On Thursday, May 16, 2002, at 09:33 , Stainless Steel Rat wrote:
>
> * Chris Ruprecht <chrup_at_earthlink.net> on Thu, 16 May 2002
> | The Apple Xserver has nothing which makes me want to get one. The
> drives
> | are ATA, where I would only use UltraSCSI-160.
>
> Bah. FCAL w/ 7200 RPM drives.
>
what are those? what about fibre drives, 15000 RPM? They are supposed to
be pretty darn fast and I see them selling cheap, starting at around
$0.99 for 18 GB on ebay.
> | RAID is advertised as 'software', I would only use hardware RAID.
>
> I've used most of the big-name software RAID systems: Veritas & Sun's
> ODS,
> IBM's LVM, SGI's LVM, HP's LVM, Linux Software RAID, DEC's LSM. They
> all
> suck. Some suck less than others, and some suck less for some uses
> (like
> stripingZ), but they all suck.
>
Agreed, they all do - Hardware RAID is the only way to go.
>
> AltiVec is nigh-useless for file servers, which barely touch the CPU
> anyway
That, again, depends very much on what you're having your machine do. We
use a lot of stored procedures and server side executables, and they all
run on the server. With 200 users hitting the server at the same time,
CPU usage might get pretty high at times.
> since the disk and memory I/O are all DMA and handled by auxillary
> controllers. And it is not all that useful for application servers.
> SMP
> is the way to go there.
>
with only 2 CPUs in the Xserver, you're once again limited. Clustering
would get past the problem in a way, but then, I didn't see that
advertized anywhere on the Apple site either.
> | the C compiler they use (GCC) doesn't optimize for AltiVec code.
>
> Are you sure about that?
>
Yes. There are rumors that Apple will build that into their version 3.xx
of GCC, but it's not in the current, 2.95.2, version.
> | MacOS X Server is not up to scratch as far as speed is
> concerned. [...]
>
> Mac OS X Server has one absolutely fatal flaw, one missing feature that
> will kill it for the high availability market: no journaling filesystem.
>
Well ... you can always run YellowDog Linux on the machine, but on the
other hand, I can just as well run Linux on an Intel based box for
half - oh, a third - of the price. For our company, the discussion is
pretty academic, since our database provider sees no need to port their
product to a new platform.
Although, as Bill notes, Oracle is ported, that's just the back-end. To
make this work well, you have to have the client side of things, too.
What development/deployment tools are there for MacOS X (client)? Java?
C++? Get real, you don't write commercial apps in those. In the Windows
world, you have a few tools like PowerBuilder or even (and I never
believed, I say that) - Visual Basic. What you have on the Mac?
RealBasic? Hmmm without documentation, not much ...
Don't get me wrong, I am all for Mac - this email comes out of
Mail.app - OS X. I'm just a little disappointed in Apple.
Chris Ruprecht
1505 Fort Clark Boulevard #1-205 * Gainesville, FL 32606
E-mail: chrup_at_earthlink.net
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