Date: Sun, 4 Jan 1998 14:11:46 +0100 From: Lukas Wunner <lukas@design.de> To: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=22Luis_E=2E_Mu=F1oz=22?= <lem@cantv.net> Cc: freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: [fbsd-isp] Designing for a very large ISP Message-ID: <19980104141146.32430@reactor> In-Reply-To: =?iso-8859-1?Q?=3C3=2E0=2E5=2E32=2E19980103121611=2E007af8f0=40pop=2Ecan?= =?iso-8859-1?Q?tv=2Enet=3E=3B_from_=22Luis_E=2E_Mu=F1oz=22_on_Sat=2C_Jan?= =?iso-8859-1?Q?_03=2C_1998_at_12=3A16=3A11PM_-0400?= References: <3.0.5.32.19980103121611.007af8f0@pop.cantv.net>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
Hi, > During the first year, it'll have to support some 100000 users. > Of course, we've already chosen FreeBSD as the core OS for this > after looking to Digital Unix, Solaris and Windows NT. My suggestion would be to look at an SGI Origin 200/2000 or Sun U2 box instead of a PC box running FreeBSD. We have experienced severe problems with PCs wrt expandability/scalability. E.g., we currently have 256MB of RAM in our news box but would love to go to 512MB, but the motherboard is not capable of doing that although the documentation and the webpages state the contrary (it's a Tyan Tomcat III or IV). If you want to go to something like 1GB or 2GB of RAM, you're stuck with a PC. The only solution seem to be PPro based machines, but the chipsets available so far are really ugly wrt memory and PCI performance in my opinion (as compared to good old Pentium based boards). The only chipset which seems to be able to support lots of RAM and more than 4 PCI cards seems to be the Orion GX, one implementation being the AMI Goliath board (cf. www.ami.com). However, I have not been able so far to get my hands on one of these boards *without* buying a large expensive box from Compaq et al (it seems AMI only sells these boards to OEMs, at least I have not found a distributor here in Germany, if you know of one, please drop me a line). The Goliath board also requires special (read: expensive) DIMMs, you can not use standard PS/2s or SDRAMs. Experience also has shown that usually you have to invest more time into getting a PC based server running as compared to a machine which was designed from scratch to be a high performance/bandwidth server like the SGI Origin 2000, and time is money (I have spent *several* hours trying to get the Tomcat board running with more than 256MB of RAM). Note: this is no FreeBSD-bashing. I'd always prefer a FreeBSD-based machine to an SGI Origin 2000 if it wasn't that difficult to find PC hardware which suits our needs wrt scalability/performance. Any recommendations for high-end PC hardware are welcome. Thanks, Lukas. -- lukas wunner unix, internetworking and security engineer lukas@wunner.de LW26-RIPE http://www.wunner.de/~lukas/ Funkmodems mit 2.4GHz FAQ http://www.wunner.de/~lukas/funk/
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?19980104141146.32430>