[CentOS] i386 or x86_64 installation

Maciej Ĺťenczykowski

maze at cela.pl
Wed Jan 24 06:29:54 UTC 2007


On Tue, 23 Jan 2007, Benjamin Smith wrote:

> On Monday 22 January 2007 08:05, Matt wrote:
>> I am upgrading a very heavilly used email server to a AMD64 dual core
>> with CentOS.  I am staying with i386 since the web GUI we use lists
>> 64bit support as beta and I do not want any problems.  The real draw
>> back I see is the max RAM on i386 but perhaps I am wrong.  90 percent
>> of our CPU load is Spamassassin.  Disk I/O is likely a big bottle neck
>> as well.  Currently we run 2 gigabyte of RAM but will likely move to
>> 4G of DDR2 RAM.  Moving from PATA to SATA drives as well.
>
> SATA is better than PATA, but it pales compared to SCSI. Even with SATA, an
> rsync of a large directory tree can hammer the performance of a server, but
> with SCSI, it doesn't register enough, on a much busier server, to even
> notice!
>
> So, evaluate if the $500 for a *good* disk subsystem is actually worth it - in
> my case, the answer is a resounding....  YES!!!!

I'm pretty sure this has nothing to do with PATA, SATA or SCSI.
Simply disks for SCSI are usually 10k or 15k versions with much smaller 
capacities in multi-disk RAID setups instead of 4.2k 5.4k or 7.2k 
PATA/SATA single disks with extreme capacities and smaller on-board 
buffers.

Vide: my SCSI system has: 192 MB raid card + 6 x 15k 73 GB disks in RAID5
compare that with my PATA/SATA systems which are lucky if they have a 7.2k 
disk with 8 MB cache.

Maciej
(not saying SATA is better, just saying the difference between the two is 
very small, the difference is not from the protocol, it's from the 
inherently more expensive and better hardware which is made for SCSI - as 
a point of fact many of the cheaper PATA/SATA/SCSI drivers have the same 
internals just different external connectors and possibly differing 
firmware [different optimizations turned on - for server apps instead of 
desktop single file streaming])

[plus servers have more RAM on the CPU for disk caching to begin with]




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