Configuring an older server for speed...

[Kurt Buff]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 6:39 PM, Ryan Coleman <ryan.coleman at cwis.biz> wrote:
> Kurt Buff wrote:
>>
>> All,
>>
>> I've got a Compaq ML570 with 2gb RAM, dual PIII Xeon 700s and 5x10k
>> RPM drives in it attached to a Compaq 5300 RAID card that I'm going to
>> be using as a squid box.
>>
>> I've configured two drives as RAID 1 with the third as a hot spare,
>> and two drives as RAID0 - I intend to put the squid cache on the
>> latter, and have mounted it as /squid.
>>
>> I'm running 7STABLE from a couple of days ago.
>>
>> What might I do to achieve better/best performance? I'm replacing a
>> less capable whitebox. One of the big issues I've had has manifested
>> itself recently - we've moved from a T1 to a DS3, and while overall
>> throughput has increased dramatically, people are now complaining that
>> "the Internet is slow", which I've found is all down to initial page
>> load. I'm pursuing optimizing squid elsewhere, and want to focus on
>> getting this box as fast as I reasonably can before sticking squid on
>> it. I've got more RAM to put into it - I'd be stealing from another
>> machine that's little used, but I should be able to get it to 4gb RAM.
>>
>> As a benchmark, there are about 230 people in my site who will be
>> using this box for their proxy, and their usage is all over the map -
>> worse, I haven't been given the time to put any analysis tools into
>> play to figure out the load on the old box, as we're in the middle of
>> a number of other projects of equal or higher priority.
>>
>> Kurt
>>
>
> I would recommend fBSD 6.3 instead of 7. You don't need it, unless you have
> a documented reason it has to be 7.0


Why not? It installed really well, and I've had no issues with it on
other machines.