I too, really like the Appro boxes (I'm using a a variety of them, 1124S, 1124i, 1224X). Perhaps look at the Appro 1124i, 1U/DualAMD/cold-swap-ide). This box may be marketed under different names by different resellers; they are very reasonably priced for what you get. They have excellent cooling, and are well-built; they use a commodity Taiwanese Mainboard (Tyan Thunder K7) in a somewhat-proprietary-but-designed-around-that-board chassis. The nice thing about this setup is you can buy boxed Tyan mainboards as shelved-spares. The resellers of these boxes, though, are the ones who are going to provide support, so keep that in mind. Appro is essentially just a manufacturer (though you can buy direct from them). If you went the AMD route, I would strongly suggest against a DIY approach; cooling is a serious issue. Intel Xeon Prestonia boxes run very cool (we have Appro 1224X boxes, and the exhaust is not even warm). For an idea about cooling on AMD servers, Appro's 1124 AMD servers have excellent cooling, but the exhaust is decently warm; anything less than marvelous cooling would likely fry your dual AMD box. If you want to go the DIY approach, you can get all the components you would need for building a box, but I would suggest going the P4-Xeon route, and get a MB with good environment sensors drivers, and buy a case with the best cooling you can find. Bottom line: AthlonMP offers the best value proposition compared to Xeon, but make sure your cooling is done right if you go this route. We run Debian on all our boxes. With our newest setup, we plan to run multiple Zope ZEO client instances on each 2P/1U web-server box, tied to one CPU each - each bound to an IP with a dedicated 100MB 3com on-board Ethernet port that our front-end squid-cache proxy server(s) connects to. We connect on the back-end via switched Copper GB Ethernet to our 1U ZSS boxes (which have on-board Intel Pro 1000 GB port and a hardware raid card in their single PCI slot). If you are running Linux, you may want to investigate CPU affinity patches to the kernel to avoid the SMP penalty you might incur with a single Zope instance wandering across CPUs. Sean -----Original Message----- From: David Hart [mailto:dhart@atlantisblue.com.au] Sent: Sunday, September 15, 2002 12:50 AM To: zope@zope.org Subject: Re: [Zope] New server recommendations Hi Howard & All, I'm in a similar predicament, albeit not so urgent. I'm looking at APPRO (http://appro.com/) 1RU dual Athlon servers. (Available from Emagen (http://emagen.com.au/) for purchases in Australia). My Zope installations typically use external processes like MySQL, HTMLDOC, apache/ssl, sendmail, etc., so the second CPU is useful as overflow in crunch situations. -- David Hart Atlantis Blue Pty Ltd On Sun, 2002-09-15 at 17:22, Howard Hansen wrote: [snip]
From recent discussions, it appears that Zope doesn't benefit much from a dual processor system, but it does benefit from higher clock rates and more RAM. So should I invest in a faster single-proc system with a couple of gigs of RAM, or go with a slower dual-proc box?