18 Oct
2008
18 Oct
'08
9:52 p.m.
On Thursday 16 October 2008 12:10, Dave McGuire wrote:
On Oct 16, 2008, at 7:21 AM, Dan Williams wrote:
Oh my.
I have just bought a dual 900mhz Sparc machine
with 2gb memory. for
?130. I haven't got it yet. But I am quite sure it will be fast enough
to use as a desktop machine. Also should be fairly quick at compiling
bits and pieces.
I haven't had a decent Sun machine for a few years so am looking
forward to this one.
I did have an Ultra 2 with dual 400 procs and it was my main machine
for a good few years.
Ohhhh my. :) You are going to LOVE your new machine, then. I've
always loved the Ultra2; it's one of Sun's finest workstations. The
UltraSPARC-II processor is a good design...but the UltraSPARC-III
kicks the snot out of it. It's a whole different world.
For about a year until a recent upgrade, I ran the following on a
dual 900MHz UltraSPARC-III+ machine with 4GB of RAM and native FC
disks, a Sun Fire 280r:
- Eleven virtual machines (using Solaris "Zones" virtualization
system)
- An email server for about 100 people, comprising:
= Incoming SMTP, 50K-70K messages per day, ~91% spam
= Spam filtering (heavy REGEXP processing)
= Virus scanning, for those few still running Windows
= POP3, IMAP, and IMAPS spool access
- Two web servers handling about thirty virtual hosts, most PHP-based
- Network monitoring system
- Real-time NEXRAD weather imagery processing system
- A biggish (20 queries/sec) database server
- Three Sun Ray thin client terminals (often running Firefox,
Thunderbird, etc)
- All of my software development (editing, compiling, testing)
...All on a SINGLE 4U rackmount machine with two 900MHz UltraSPARC-
III+ processors (8MB L2 cache each) and 4GB of RAM. It was a bit
swappy with only 4GB (450 processes in the process table, "ps" output
scrolls and scrolls), but very responsive. I recently upgraded it to
a dual 1.2GHz UltraSPARC-III+ machine with 8GB of RAM. Show THAT to an x86 fanboy and watch the pimply jaw
drop. ;)
I've no particular attachment to peecee architecture/hardware, except for the
fact that my budget for equipment seems to be way down there on that level...
What'd you do with the old machine? :-)
--
Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
ablest -- form of life in this section of space, a critter that can
be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
-
Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James
M Dakin