StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Ace Pace wrote:You could probably go with a lower end dual core X2. I don't think the CPU scaling matters that much here.

RAM would work, I suggest that upgrade anyway, but prices for DDR RAM are only going up over time, so I suggest that purchese be done early rather then later.

Not qualified to comment on the OS.

Darth Wong wrote:

Ace Pace wrote:You could probably go with a lower end dual core X2. I don't think the CPU scaling matters that much here.

You're probably right; the second core matters more than the clock speed, especially for a server.

I didn't know that RAM prices were headed upwards. Thanks for the heads-up.

InnocentBystander wrote:Have you run an explain plan on some of your more time consuming queries? You might be able to improve performance with a couple extra indexes.

RThurmont wrote:By the way, if I might ask, what specific version of Mandriva do you use for the board's server? The Free edition? I would assume (hope) its not Mandriva One?

Mandriva One is a nice little distro, but IMO the stripped-down versions of several packages that it contains are really annoying, and the package manager seems to have a hard time doing upgrades on its own. With Mandriva 2007.1 (which I like, due to the fact that Metisse, while for the most part being ugly and totally useless, does cause font rendering to improve considerably), I had to build vim 7 from source in order to replace the useless, stripped down included version.

Speaking of servers, I'm in the process of migrating all of my websites to a dedicated server I recently purchased, and was up until 2:00 AM last night doing work on it. The complex element is that I'm experimenting with virtualization on it, and have been messing around with the idea of running NetBSD and OpenBSD vms atop a Debian base system. However, to my annoyance, the VMWare Server Console is entirely too slow to be used effectively over a remote connection (you can do it, but its just agonizingly slow) so this neccessitates getting the VMs configured locally and then uploading them (and hoping they can be made to work to the point where you can ssh in).

Uraniun235 wrote:My suggestion would be to consider purchasing used parts; you might be able to get a better deal, especially on the RAM.

Also, are you running a 64-bit version of Mandriva?

Mandriva 2008.0 PowerPack download edition. It's just not worth my time to fuck around trying to give the free versions all the functionality that I want, so I paid a few bucks to get the loaded one. Some people are adamantly against paying for Linux because it is nominally free, but time and aggravation are money too, and it's still cheap when you consider the fact that I can install it on every machine I own.

You can do an awful lot with ssh, but remote X is still pretty damned sluggish even over a fast Internet connection. Luckily, I have physical access to the server so that's not a problem for me. Mind you, I'm not doing anything fancy on it; bbs.stardestroyer.net maps right into the main webroot directory.

RThurmont wrote:I have no problems with the idea of paying for a Linux distro...indeed, I do it all the time, in the form of Linux Format magazine, which I find to be a great way to randomly peruse the various different distributions out there. One similiar thing to what you described, though, that annoys me, is the increasing militance of the *Ubuntu-using segments of the community...for example, within the local Linux user group, Kubuntu is the standard and everything else tends to be perceived as crap (except for Debian, which seems to be the preferred server variant). I however personally find Kubuntu to be vastly overrated, and Mandriva and Suse to be vastly underrated in the whole grand scheme of things.

VMWare Server actually uses some modified variant of VNC+X for communication, I'm not real clear on what it is, exactly, but I do know that it is not straight X (but having X is a prerequisite for installation onto a Linux box). The GUI portions of the interface are fine over the Internet, but the actual window through which you view and operate on the guest OS is just too darn slow; you type a character into the shell and wait half a second for it to appear.

The Kernel wrote:If you are having trouble with the performance of the database, might I also suggest you think about a getting a third Raptor drive and doing a RAID 5 array? This will significantly improve your read performance while at the same time giving you an extra bit of security in the event of a drive failure.

As for the CPU upgrade, it's hard to recommend an S939 upgrade right now due to it being a completely dead platform. However that being said, you are probably best putting in a cheap CPU and RAM upgrade and then getting a new machine around this time next year when Nehalem hits.

In its optimal form, RAID 5 provides substantially faster read performance than a single drive or RAID 1 configuration, but write performance suffers due to the need to write (and sometimes recalculate) the parity information for the majority of writes performed. While this write performance is still faster than a single disk configuration in most cases, the true performance benefit of a RAID 5 array is in its read ability.

[snip]



RAID 5 finds a comfortable home in most "read often, write infrequently" server applications which require long periods of uptime, such as web servers, file/print servers, and database servers. Dedicated RAID 5 controllers that include large amounts of RAM can negate much of the write performance penalty, but such setups are quite a bit more costly. Note also that simplified RAID 5 controllers exist that require the CPU to perform the parity calculations, which can result in write performance that is lower than a single drive.

Pros:
Good usable amount of data (capacity is the sum of all but one drive in the set)
Fault-tolerant - can survive one disk failure without impact to users
Strong read performance
Cons:
Write performance (without a large controller cache) is substantially below that of RAID 0
Expensive (either in terms of controller cost or CPU usage) due to parity calculations

Darth Wong wrote:Is a RAID 5 array a good idea for a database server? I haven't used one for years, but I recall they always had very good read performance coupled with shitty write performance. Also, I'd have to reformat all the drives, which could get messy.

InnocentBystander wrote:I don't know about the performance of mySql, but what about moving to a more robust database? I'd wager an oracle license is no more expensive than a new CPU.

phongn wrote: No! RAID5 is very bad for database loads. If you need to increase the speed, you'd probably have to go RAID10 (not RAID 0+1, which is what some controllers do anyways when you select "RAID10"), ideally on a good hardware controller.

Darth Wong wrote: Is a RAID 5 array a good idea for a database server? I haven't used one for years, but I recall they always had very good read performance coupled with shitty write performance. Also, I'd have to reformat all the drives, which could get messy.

Yeah, I was thinking that the dual-core CPU and RAM upgrade will take this platform to pretty much the limit of what it can do. After that, it's time for the forklift upgrade.

The Kernel wrote:Why is it bad for database loads? Do you have some benchmarks to show this? I've never actually heard that and I would assume that for a situation like SDN read performance of the database would be more critical than write performance and RAID5 is excellent at random read performance.