[ale] cheap linux-friendly pcs?

[Jeff Hubbs]

John -

If you aren't going to build it from parts, Wal-Mart or any of our local
screwdriver shops ought to be able to set you up.  Or, you can
dumpster-dive at Microseconds - one of the best deals I ever got there
was a Socket 7 board into which I was able to stick an AMD K6-2+/500
from eBay.

Since I work with slowish machines a lot (more so than even your P/200),
one thing I've learned is that it's often not so much the CPU as it is
the disk I/O that kills.  The worst situation you can have is one where
you have only one drive and you've got the CD-ROM drive on the same
cable.  Along those lines, here are some of the things I try to do:

*  Stick as much RAM in as you can.  Because disk I/O kills, swapping
therefore also must kill.

*  If the machine has two equal IDE controllers (as most machines of
that vintage will), exploit them by putting one drive on each (putting
two drives on either bus is possible but hurts you on speed).  Split up
as much disk activity that you expect to be simultaneous as you can
between the two controllers.  As a baseline, consider splitting up
swapping activity from everything else, even if this means that you
dedicate an entire drive to nothing but swap.  

* If you are going to be more RAM-challenged than non-swap
disk-I/O-challenged, put a swap partition on both drives and give them
equal priority in /etc/fstab.  The kernel will use them in a RAID-like
fashion.

* Use the drive with the most physical heads and/or the fastest spindle
speed for the software operation that needs to go the fastest.  You'll
have to examine your machine in operation to determine if that operation
is swap or something Squirrelmail-related.  Typing the drive's model
number into Google will often take you right to the drive's specs (DON'T
go by the C/H/S on the drive's label).  

* Use RAID striping w/o parity in software to get more speed out of a
pair of partitions, but only if you're willing to take the reliability
hit.  Don't bother expanding this to two drives per controller because
that'll eat up your performance gain from the RAID.  

* Stick in another controller card, be it IDE or SCSI.  If it's IDE,
this could mean that you can stick in four drives across four
controllers in the machine.  If it's narrow SCSI, you can stick seven
drives on there.  This will probably bump up against the limits of what
your case and/or your PS can handle.  If you go the SCSI route, know
that the cheapest cards on the shelf will only do 10MB/s, which isn't
really all that good.  

* Use hdparm to make sure that you're getting the most out of your IDE
controllers.  If you've got DMA capability, you want to make sure it's
turned on (see http://www.frankenlinux.com/guides/tweaks.html) for an
excellent treatise).

* Always try to keep in mind that using electronics in lieu of
mechanicals to access different chunks of data, whether it's by reading
across the heads inside a drive as opposed to radially across the
plattters or among different disks instead of different places within
the same disk, is MUCH better for performance.

- Jeff

On Tue, 2002-07-02 at 14:11, tewkewl at mindspring.com wrote:
> 
> any asus motherboard with built in everything.
> 
> -Patrick
> 
> On Tue, 2 Jul 2002 12:35:34 -0500 (EST) John Wells <jb at sourceillustrated.com>
> wrote:
> 
> Aside from the Microtel/Walmart pcs, are there any cheap linux-friendlies
> out there?
> 
> I'm not looking for an overwhelming amount of power...just something that
> will run my Apache/PHP SquirrelMail server better than my current 200mhz
> sloth.
> 
> Thanks!
> 
> John
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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