[plug] Hardware: RAM questions

[Simon Scott]

	1) Yes, it should work. 

	2) Yes, it should work better. With the recent quality of RAM, you
are better off buying ram one speed step up from what you will be running it
at. I read a recent report where they tested most major brands of ram and
came to the conclusion that running the ram at the advertised speed is
marginal at best. Some PC133 can only run at 120 or so. So buying 133 for
100 is perfect.

	3) No. You can never have enough physical RAM. However, be careful
with the swap settings, you can cause linux to swap unnecessarily if you
dont get it right (having too much swap seems to be the worst). Twice the
physical RAM seems to be a good yardstick, although with 2gig you might want
to reconsider and read up on this before choosing a swap partition size.

	4) Recently Ive come to the conclusion that all distros are pretty
much the same, and the administrator makes all the difference. Id avoid
Mandrake as a server OS though, but either redhat or debian would be a good
choice. The best way to do this stuff is to install only the base, and then
add packages as required. If you install everything it makes it so much
harder to administer. And anyone who installs X on a server should be shot.



	Beyond this, if you really want to increase the box's performance as
a web server (especially with dynamic stuff using postgres or mysql) maybe
you should consider implementing RAID of some form. You cant beat a good
disk subsystem with a sizable cache.

	Above all, have fun with it.







	From:	Burnt Damper <youngman at burntdamper.com.au> on 15/10/2001
10:53 AM
	Please respond to plug at plug.linux.org.au@SMTP at Exchange
	To:	plug at plug.linux.org.au@SMTP at Exchange
	cc:	 

	Subject:	[plug] Hardware: RAM questions

	G'day people,
	 
	Just a few questions I hope you can help me out with...
	 
	I have just purchased an Intel ISP 2150 rack mount server - with no
RAM.
	 
	Here is the deal: It is supposed to take 100Mhz ECC CAS2 SDRAM...
but after looking around I find that 133Mhz ECC CAS2 RAM is only about $4
per stick more expensive... 
	 
	1) Is it correct to assume that the 133Mhz RAM will work in this
machine (obviously it will only run at the 100Mhz of the CPU - but will it
work as well as effectively as getting the normal 100MHz stuff?) 
	 
	2) If it would work - is it fair to assume that it would be even
more stable - due to the fact that it was designed to run so much faster?
	 
	3) Is there any disadvantage of going overboard with memory? I am
contemplating putting 2Gb in the machine (I am going to order it from the US
and so far it looks like a 512Mb stick here (cost price + 5%) could buy
you over 1.5Gb of exactly the same RAM there (full retail) - same
manufacturer and all...). - It is only going to act as a web server (In fact
I am going to be running a few Post-Nuke sites on it for those involved in
the PLUG site...), So it is a major overkill... the question is whether it
will pull down performance or increase it?
	 
	4) If it makes any difference to the above questions - we will be
running Debian with Apache, PHP4, MySQL, and a few other even less
significant packages... Regardless of what you answer to this we will prolly
stick with Debian but does anyone have an opinion on which linux would be
best for use on a web server?
	 
	Thanks guys,
	 
	Guv.



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