Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (2702 mails)

[bcr@xxxxxxxxxxx (Bill C Riemers)]

Also, look in your local bookstore.  Most tips for performance tuning
Unix apply to Linux.  Although I haven't seen a Linux port of SAR yet.
For the most part, your machine is only acting as a server for four
machines, you've gone into extreme overkill already.  A 66 MHz pentium
with 32MB's of RAM is a monster system for acting as a web and a file
server.  I use to administer machines like that that were actively 
support several hundred coherent users.

The biggest bottle neck at the time was the 10MB eathernet cards.  Now
100MB cards are cheap.  Just be sure your hub supports the 100MB rate
otherwise by a better hub.  Now if you aren't running special processes
on the machine you have KILLER server.  With the system you described,
you can go ahead and use it interactively, running resource hog programs
like VMWARE, GIMP, parallel compiles, etc and still get good performance
out of it as a server at the same time.

If you have money to burn, invest it on a backup system and more disk space.
No matter how much disk space you have, you'll always find ways to use more.
Chances are you are at the point where adding more memory will actually
slow your system down, because it will do more paging.  I never have quite
understood just how that works, but I've seen it time and time again.
Excess memory can slow down a machine.

Just make sure SMB is enabled in your kernel.  With a dual processor system
that is extremely important.  For the most part, your speed limit is 
the PC clock interrupt.  Linux uses 100 clock ticks per second.  That 
means that if you have 200 non-blocking processing running per processor,
each process will only get 1 clock tick per every two seconds.  This is
the only speed limit I regularly bump heads with in Unix, and most programs
are designed to work well with this limitation.

                                Bill

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