New Server Hardware

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[akiy]

Hi everyone,

After a bit of work and elbow grease (as well as a bit of thermal grease (har!)) yesterday afternoon, I've installed some new hardware (and kernel) here in the AikiWeb server. We're now running an SMP-aware and capable kernel on Gigabyte GA-7DPXDW-P motherboard running dual Athlon 2600+ processors with 2 gigabytes of ECC registered DDR RAM.

I was planning on installing it a few weeks ago, but I ended up having to RMA the motherboard once since it died during testing. After I received the new motherboard, I put it through its paces again on a test server and was finally able to install it and the new RAM yesterday!

Thanks especially to everyone who has become contributing members (http://www.aikiweb.com/forums/subscriptions.php) recently, as your support helped the purchase of the above hardware!

Everything seems to be running quite happily, smoothly, and hopefully more quickly for everyone, but please don't hesitate to let me know should you encounter any odd behavior from the server.

Best regards,

-- Jun

[aikitim23]

did you buy 2 amd2600 mp? or xp and do the mod?

[akiy]

Hi Tim,

I thought about just getting two Athlon XP's and connecting the L5 bridges on them manually, but decided to just get the two MP CPU's to play it safe. I'd rather spend a bit more money to ensure stability as well as maintain the warranty, just in case.

So, folks, have you noticed any changes (for better or for worse) with the new hardware? At least for me, the server seems faster, but I'm also doing a bunch of administrative stuff in the background. I also tweaked the HTML templates a bit so that they should be loading up a bit faster, too...

-- Jun

[DanielR]

Definitely seems faster. Many thanks!

[otto]

Dual Athlon 2600...hope u got a nice cooling system...

I wonder , wouldnt a 3.06 Ghz Pentium 4 with Hyperthreading superior to that setup , at least on arithmetics?...my response times from aikiweb have increased a bit lately btw....

[aikitim23]

yea otto it would, but dual xeons would have been a helluva lot more expensive.....also Jun, you might have been better off with nonregistered ECC ram, but thats just my opinion, other than that the site has been quicker to the click lately, great job :ai: :ki: tim

[akiy]

Hi Tim,

Yes, non-ECC RAM would have been a bit quicker and also less expensive, but because I wanted to make sure I could expand up to the maximum 4 gigabytes of RAM and the motherboard that I bought needs ECC RAM if I wanted to have more than 2 gigabytes of RAM, I went ahead and got them.

In any case, overall on the backend of things, the load average on the system hardly ever goes up above 0.10 and usually hovers around 0.03 or so. It looks like the CPU's are pretty much idling most of the time so getting a hyperthreaded Xeon or whatnot probably wouldn't make much if any difference. I think what's helped the most, frankly, is the more than tripling of the RAM that was in the server.

Now, if I could only find a bit of time to do some of the software projects I've been meaning to do...

-- Jun

[DanielR]

Jun, just curious - were you planning to upgrade the harddisks as well? Or has it been your experience that HD speed doesn't affect the system's response time much?

[bcole23]

That's almost exaclty the same as my home computer, just no ECC ram. That's pretty weird. I also had to RMA the first MB they sent me too.

I'm an Oracle DBA by trade and 3d artist by hobby so I tend to hit my hardware pretty hard. Great setup for very little money.

[akiy]

Hi Daniel,

Hard drive speed is pretty important, of course, on a web/database server, but I have things set up so as to minimize the read/writes necessary (ie lots of caching in RAM in both the database, Apace, and PHP layers). Watching "vmstat" shows disk activity to be pretty minimal at this point.

With that said, though, I was thinking of updating the SCSI subsystem in the server to at least Ultra160. I found myself looking around for a new SCSI card and drive just a couple of weeks ago. It would probably be total overkill, but I guess I just like shiny new toys -- especially computer parts!

-- Jun

[DanielR]

Makes perfect sense. Thanks!

[aikitim23]

SCSI = mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm i like, have fun wit dat setup jun.....