[NMLUG] Linux rocks

[niosop at gmail.com (Matthew Bowie)]

And if you still need Windows (or others) for some reason, you can run them
under VMWare Server, which is now free (beer).  Although the performance
won't be acceptable for gaming or 3D apps, it's more than adequate for
testing to see if a web app renders properly under IE (which is all I use
Win for anymore anyways).

On 3/26/07, Steve Browne <sbrowne at ix.netcom.com> wrote:
>
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2007 21:37:14 -0600, you wrote:
>
> >Just thought I'd share some stuff that happened today.
> >
> >I just finished moving a LAMP(php/perl) stack over from a Pentium 4
> 3.4GHz/1GB
> >RAM machine to a Pentium D 3.4/2GB RAM server.  There was about 1.5GB of
> >data in the MySQL database, and the client had a long running query that
> >would aggregate much of it and display it on a page.  It would normally
> take
> >about 20-30 seconds to run.
> >
> >After moving over the scripts and database, the client tested the script,
> >and as expected, it ran only slightly faster than it did on the other
> >machine.  Then the client wanted to run two instances of the script and
> see
> >how the dual core system handled it.  He started one, but before he could
> >start the second, the first one was complete.  He was pretty concerned,
> >thinking that something much have been broken by the move, and that a
> cached
> >copy was being served.  How could a 30 second query be served in less
> than a
> >second?
> >
> >A quick look at "free -m" showed that although the OS and LAMP stack was
> >only taking 95MB of RAM, over 1.5GB was being used as cache.  The
> majority
> >of the normal 30 second query time was spent reading the data off disk.
> >After the first query, Linux cached all the database files in RAM, so the
> >next time the queries didn't have to pull anything off disk.  That
> combined
> >with MySQL's query cache made a big difference.  The client was pretty
> >impressed.
> >
> >The moral?
> >Linux's aggressive file system caching is a good thing (usually).
> >Linux doesn't let unused RAM sit around doing nothing, and sometimes it
> >shows in a big way.  So, if you can afford it, go for more RAM.
>
> If you use a multipurpose system, that presents some problems. If you
> have a legacy WinME shared installation, it won't run in more than
> 1.5Gb. RAM. If you have a shared XP installation, it won't run in more
> than 4Gb. RAM. For a while Hiren's BootCD (FreeDOS) balked at more
> than 2Gb. RAM, but the latest release (v8.9) has fixed that.
>
> Moral: dump Windows, though DOS can still be handy.
>
> Steve
> Stephen B. Browne
> sbrowne at ix.netcom.com
> "Ubi bene, ibi patria."
>
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>



-- 
Matthew Bowie
Programmer/IT Consultant
niosop at gmail.com
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