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        Mon, 5 May 1997 10:48:28 -0700
Date: Mon, 5 May 1997 10:48:28 -0700 (PDT)
From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com>
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To: Tyson Boellstorff <tysonb@pionet.net>
cc: abial@warman.org.pl, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject: Re: Subject: SMP hardware recommendations
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On Mon, 5 May 1997, Tyson Boellstorff wrote:

> My company considers buying a new SMP machine for some
> CPU/disk-intensive
> tasks (similar to news server: searching and processing large quantities
> of text files), and I convinced them to give a try to FreeBSD. The idea
> behind it is to save some money on another Sun Ultra, if possible...

I don't think I would use FreeBSD in production use on an SMP machine
right now.  After all, the code was only recently imported into
FreeBSD-current.  Of course, if you're willing to be a guinea pig..  :)

If you're already using Suns, you may want to look at Solaris/Intel.  It
has excellent SMP support, and from an administration standpoint is
identical to a Sun.  UnixWare would also be a good choice for SMP.

At any rate, feel free to go with FreeBSD, and if you have any reliability
problems with its SMP support, you can always fall back to a commercial
UNIX until they get fixed.

> What hardware would you recommend? Now I'm thinking about the following
> setup: 
> 
> * MB: 2xPPro 200MHz, 512kB cache, manufacturer: ???, chipset: ???
> * RAM: 256 MB (EDO ???)
> * SCSI: Adaptec 2940U
> * HDD: ??? (ca. 8 GB total)
> * Network: Intel EtherExpress 10/100 (fxp driver)
> * other hardware is less important (i.e. floppy, graphics, keyboard...)

Sounds good!  I believe the PPro with 512K cache is still significantly
more expensive (2x) the price of the PPro w/ 256k cache, though.

> And what do you think about performance of such a machine (comparing to
> Sun Ultra 1/140)? 

I think you'll have to run your own tests to see, but a dual PPro should
be faster than a single UltraSPARC.

Cheers,
Jake