Hello Neil,

Thanks for the reply.

Neil Schemenauer wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 09, 2003 at 10:41:29AM -0500, Jimmie Houchin wrote:
>
>>Current configuration is a dual Opteron with a SATA RAID of 4 250gb
>>drives with 4gb RAM. I am hoping to run Gentoo or Debian.
>
> Well, I'm jealous. :-)

Me too. :)

I wish I could have one of these as my desktop machine.

>>I am not experienced in this.
>>
>>Will Apache 2.0.47, SCGI, Quixote, MySQL be able to effectively utilize
>>the 4gb of RAM? Or am I getting more RAM than will utilized.
>
> Hard to say since you didn't give any information on what kind of
> site you will be running.  Quixote does like lots of memory.  That
> said, modern machines have massive amounts of memory as compared to
> a few years ago.  Our largest application is currently using about
> 200 MB of memory on a dual Athon XP machine.  The database server
> (ZEO), also running on the same machine, is using about 45 MB.
 >
> We've got a few more Quixote applications running on that server and
> here's what "free" says:
>
>                total       used       free     shared    buffers cached
>   Mem:       2069164    1824324     244840          0     249096 1008128
>   -/+ buffers/cache:     567100    1502064
>   Swap:      1959672      77812    1881860
>
>
>>I know, not enough data on my app, etc.
>
>
> Right.  Also, make sure to account for the fact that Opteron is a
> 64-bit architecture.  I think you can expect to need about twice as
> much memory as an IA32 machine (unless you are using 32-bit mode),
> due to larger pointers, ints, and data alignment padding.

I'm not sure whether it will be 32 or 64 yet. Somewhat depends on the
pain of getting Gentoo or Debian as 64bit. I'm not ready to spend $750
on Suse for the 64bit.

When I get the machine I'll have to try a few things.

The database will start off with a few tables having 5+ million rows.

But I imagine as with a lot of things 20% of it will be whats used 80%
of the time. I'm hoping to keep as much data cached as possible.

> BTW, I've been looking at the Opteron and the Athon 64.  The
> reduction in memory latency is impressive (due to the on-chip memory
> controller I understand).  I think that could significantly improve
> Python performance since Python does an insane amount of "pointer
> chasing".

That sounds good.

> Naively, I think so, but want to run it past more experienced folks.
>
> My guess is that 4 GB should be plenty.  2 GB would probably suffice
> but I would go with 4 if you have the budget.

Done. I just emailed the builder to confirm the purchase.
It going to cost me about $4k which is more than I wanted to spend, but
I think it will be worth it.

That's why I wanted more confidence in getting 4gb ram rather than 2gb.

But from shopping PriceWatch it only about $175 more than a nice dual
Athlon. Actually possibly cheaper as I could buy 8 512mb DIMMs rather
than the more expensive 1gb DIMMs.

I'm hoping to deploy this machine and website by the end of the month.

I may have more questions later. :)

Again thanks.

Jimmie Houchin