With Linux do Hardware Brands Matter? Post: 302584332

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Top Forums UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers With Linux do Hardware Brands Matter? Post 302584332 by Corona688 on Thursday 22nd of December 2011 09:04:38 PM

12-22-2011

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by bggibson

We have run software on Dell Servers w/ Windows and seen the performance degrade overtime. We switched to an IBM server w/ AIX and have not seen the same performance degradation over time. In fact, the IBM servers are at least five years old and continue to preform well at the same level.

How much of that is hardware vs. operating system?

Windows has its problems, but you can't blame it all on the OS. A fresh install of Windows XP on a 10 year old machine won't perform as well as it did 10 years ago because it's expected to do a lot more than it did 10 years ago.

There's kind of an obligation to keep an antivirus running on a network-connected Windows machine, especially a server. AVG used to run reasonably in 64 megs. Now it won't even try to run in 512. Their full-download exe's have more than quadrupled in size in 5 years. And that's one of the less demanding AV's. I can't even imagine what Mcaffee and Norton require these days.

On top of that, much new software will force you to install otherwise-nonessential updates just to function. The smart ones bundle many with them, so they don't even need to ask ( I think this may account for some of AVG's increasing girth ).

So I don't think it's the Windows operating system that's ultimately to blame as much as the Windows software model. There's still people using Visual Studio 6.0, buggy and old as it is, because anything newer adds an entire .Net requirement to any program containing "int main()". If you build your software with MS tools, it will demand not just newer systems, but more runtime software in general.

There's no such continuous push to extend your operating environment in UNIX. Security fixes are one thing, but your distributor's not likely to suddenly decide they really, really like a newfangled language and insist on using it for everything, dragging along its hundreds of megs of footprint, memory-hungry daemon+runtime optimizer+JIT compiler, and endless updates just to do what used to work without it. Usually. (Looking at you, Java. ;p)

---------- Post updated at 08:04 PM ---------- Previous update was at 07:49 PM ----------

Furthermore, it really does matter what you intend to do with the server. I ran a web and database server with a good number of decently intensive sites on it for several years using an old Pentium III 866Mhz with 512M RAM, with the load average mostly below .1. One instance of Wordpress took more CPU and resources than everything else combined. It's keeping the improved 3Ghz machine at a load of .4 even now.

Last edited by Corona688; 12-22-2011 at 10:01 PM..

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LEARN ABOUT FREEBSD

pmc_disable

PMC_ENABLE(3)						   BSD Library Functions Manual 					     PMC_ENABLE(3)

NAME

     pmc_disable, pmc_enable -- administrative control of hardware performance counters

LIBRARY

     Performance Counters Library (libpmc, -lpmc)

SYNOPSIS

     #include <pmc.h>

     int
     pmc_disable(int cpu, int pmc);

     int
     pmc_enable(int cpu, int pmc);

DESCRIPTION

     These functions allow specific hardware performance monitoring counters in a system to be disabled and enabled administratively.  The hard-
     ware performance counters available on each CPU are numbered using small non-negative integers, in a system dependent manner.  Disabled coun-
     ters will not be available to applications for use.

     The invoking process needs to have the PRIV_PMC_MANAGE privilege to perform these operations.

     Function pmc_disable() disables the hardware counter numbered by argument pmc on CPU number cpu.

     Function pmc_enable() enables the hardware counter numbered by argument pmc on CPU number cpu.

IMPLEMENTATION NOTES

     Hardware PMCs that are currently in use by applications cannot be disabled.  Allocation of a process scope software PMC marks all hardware
     PMCs in the system with the same pmc number as being in-use.

RETURN VALUES

     Upon successful completion, the value 0 is returned; otherwise the value -1 is returned and the global variable errno is set to indicate the
     error.

ERRORS

     A call to these functions may fail with the following errors:

     [EBUSY]		Function pmc_disable() specified a hardware PMC is currently in use.

     [EINVAL]		Arguments cpu or pmc were invalid.

     [ENXIO]		Argument cpu specified a disabled or absent CPU.

     [EPERM]		The current process lacks sufficient privilege to perform this operation.

SEE ALSO

     pmc(3), pmc_cpuinfo(3), pmc_pmcinfo(3), hwpmc(4), pmccontrol(8), priv_check(9)

BSD
								September 22, 2008							       BSD