[nycbug-talk] Memory sizing

[Isaac Levy]

Hi Francisco,

First question: what OS do you plan to run?  The key term here is  
'PAE', for i386 systems, "The Physical Address Extension (PAE)  
capability of the Intel® Pentium Pro and later CPUs allows memory  
configurations of up to 64 gigabytes" (FreeBSD handbook).

***(Note- Upcoming meeting has Mickey speaking about PAE on OpenBSD)***

On Apr 21, 2006, at 11:47 PM, Francisco Reyes wrote:

> Soon to buy a couple of new server and wondering if we should get  
> 4GB or
> 8GB. My first stop is trying to better understand memory utilization.

 From my experience with PAE on FreeBSD, it's currently an additional  
kernel compile, like SMP,

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ 
kernelconfig-config.html
Section 8.4.1

It's not rocket science, and *seems* to be stable, but the machine  
I've used it on is NOT a heavy-lifter- (it simply runs Samba with  
TONS of files).

Noteworthy- one process can only use up to 4GB of physical memory  
here.  I'm not sure if this is a limitation of the processor, or the  
FreeBSD implementation.

>
> Any suggested links?
> I have several machines simmilar machines to the functionality of  
> one of the
> new servers (mail machine), the second new server will be a PostgreSQL
> database.. to host millions of records with about 250GB worth of data.

For FreeBSD, the handbook link above helps.  For Other BSD os's, I  
hope others post urls... I'm curious too...

Rocket-
.ike