[Server-devel] Recommended tropical island XS hardware

[Martin Langhoff]

On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 6:31 AM, Tom Parker <tom at carrott.org> wrote:
> Is there a "recommended" school server hardware these days?

Not really, but the market is moving in the right direction. Thise
fanless boxes you mention...

> The schools in question are probably less than 200 students each, so I'm
> guessing an Atom processor will be ok?

Definitely yes. With 1G RAM or so. Make sure to plan for the backup space.

> There are a few people building fanless no-name boxes based on the Intel
> D510MO motherboards. I'm running one of those very successfully as my
> own server, with a 3.5" harddrive it consumes about 25W when powered by
> a wide input PicoPSU and HP Laptop brick (35W with a no-name desktop
> power supply!). Is anyone running a schoolserver with one of these? How
> many students is it good for?

Assuming 1GB RAM should be ok for 200 users, not all concurrently
hitting it -- which may well be prevented/controlled by AP
infrastructure.

The key thing is having enough RAM. As long as the working set fits in
RAM, you get graceful degradation. If users manage to use too much RAM
on the server (where too much means "part of the working set gets
pushed to swap") then performance drops immediately like a stone. The
server hits a metaphorical wall, and your users report that it has
'crashed'.

It hasn't really crashed, but it's gone from reasonable latency to
complete non-responsiveness.

IOWs, in case of doubt, beef up the RAM.


m
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 martin at laptop.org -- Software Architect - OLPC
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