Server platform comparison

[Warren Togami]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Roderick A Gammon" <AEG-Inc at hawaii.rr.com>
To: "Linux & Unix Advocates & Users" <luau at list.luau.hi.net>
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2001 11:24 PM
Subject: [luau] RE: Server platform comparison

>
> As to Postgres/MySQL- Transactions are probably not too important.  As I
> understand it, transactions are mainly for input.  Input would be done by
> student hires or admin staff, and not that many workers at any one time.
> I'm pretty sure that credit card handling for conferences, as an example,
> would not be done.  At least not in the next 18 months, at which time the
> dbs will have evolved one hopes.  So most clients will be retrieving data
> only (e.g. prospective students).

MySQL is far faster with data retrieval, especially dealing with web sites.
The current MySQL suffers mainly when you insert.

>
> Postgres is my choice simply for its UTF8 and other encoding support.  I
> have had fantastic sucess with it in corpus research projects.  CCS will
at
> least have to mix English and Mandarin.  Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean,
> Vietnamese etc. are not out of the question.  So I'd like to see them use
a
> UTF8 db to ease growing pains as more natural languages are added into the
> data.

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/09/2211228&mode=thread
Major Changes To MySQL Coming Soon - "In 4.0, to be released in mid-October:
'support for the Unicode character set"... which could mean UTF8.  Many
other excellent features coming that should make MySQL more scalable while
adding flexibility with nested queries and stored procedures.

However, Postgres is already excellent and proven.

>
> As for Mac OXS- there may be an urge to have the server also as a
> workstation.  Personally I'd reccomend against it.  But I'm not the final
> say.  But the big appeal, it seems, is simply that CCS has used Macs for a
> long time.  It's like a business that wants to keep using MS- it's simply
a
> matter of brand comfort, an understandable and human impulse.

There may be a security maintenance drawback in using Mac OS X in that
people are far less familiar and proactive with security maintenance.  Far
more people use x86 Linux, so security problems are known, publicized and
corrected much quicker.  If they INSIST on using Apple hardware for the
server, a low-end G3 or G4 tower running PowerPC Linux (probably Mandrake)
would gain the best of both worlds - though at considerably lower
performance for much higher cost.

>
> I'm still looking for TCO data for all platforms, I'll post when found or
> collated.  I am convinced of a linux system- probably $2K could bring in
> real heavyweight stuff without even busting software costs on a Win2K
> platform.  But I owe at least an attempt at impartiality.
>

$2,000 would get you...
2x Athlon XP 1800+
Tyan Thunder dual Athlon motherboard
SCSI RAID 0 + 1 (four disks)
1GB ECC DDR SDRAM
Massive tape backup device

With PLENTY of cash left over.  This setup would outperform the fastest dual
Xeon, at roughly half the price.  However, you don't need anything near this
powerful.  I'm quite sure that a single (weak) Athlon with 512-1GB of cheap
RAM would do the job.  Before our current dual Athlon server like this, we
had a single 1.2GHz Thunderbird w/ 768MB RAM that withstood two Slashdot
effects.  This is considerably more traffic than your server would have even
at peak usage.

Warren