Configuring an older server for speed...

[Kurt Buff]

On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 5:11 PM, Kurt Buff <kurt.buff at gmail.com> 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


To further extend the question - what about things like mounting the
RAID0 noatime, or other speed-enhancing settings? I've been reading
and googleing, trying to figure out how to mount it at boot, and I'm
finding it a bit confusing.

Kurt