[Mulgara-dev] Proper machine to run Mulgara on?

[Paul Gearon]

Hi,

I can only provide my own perspective here, but it may be useful.

On Jun 7, 2006, at 11:31 AM, Ben Hysell wrote:
> We don’t run a federation…so each one of these servers are separate  
> from one another and do not work together.  We have an x64 machine  
> with Windows XP x64 we have attempted to load Mulgara on, however  
> Sun doesn’t seem to provide a 1.4.2 Java build for the x64 and the  
> 1.5 build does not run all that smoothly (I would need to check  
> with the other developers, but if I remember correctly we could run  
> a couple of queries and bring the system down).

Once I have the Kowari sources converted completely to Mulgara I'll  
be looking at 1.5 (I've converted the sources, but I have some bugs  
to track down.  I don't yet know if I've created them, or if they  
snuck into the Kowari sources before I started the change)

It's not out there in the public, but I've had great success moving  
Kowari from 1.4 to 1.5.  The reason I never released it is because I  
couldn't figure out a way to configure the system to run on either  
JVM.  Now that Mulgara is on the scene we're using the opportunity to  
move completely to 1.5.  That should get checked in the next couple  
of weeks.

> What does everyone else run Mulgara on?  Given unlimited resources  
> what hardware/software combination would you set up a new Mulgara  
> system on?

I gather that you're asking this question for performance?

Almost all the developers I know are now running Kowari/Mulgara on  
Apple Macs.  :-)  However, that's not for performance, but rather for  
the flexibility of the environment.

At Tucana, Kowari was entirely developed on Intel/Linux, but with  
regular testing on Windows 2000.  I don't have proof, but I always  
got the impression that Linux performed a little better.  I think  
that this is mostly due to the way Java interacts with the filesystem.

My other machine (still in shipping, but I may see it in a week or  
two) is a P4 2.8GHz, 2GB RAM, 2x160GB SATA drives.  I usually run  
Linux on this machine, and it handles Kowari just fine (I'd often use  
this machine as it was faster than my PowerBook).  I have also run  
Windows XP on this machine, and found Kowari was pretty good, but  
it's been 18 months since I last did that.  When the computer arrives  
I'll be putting XP on it and running Mulgara there, mostly for  
testing purposes

Tucana's "performance platform" was a dual Opteron running Linux.  A  
big reason for having this machine was for the 64 bit address space.   
With a 64 bit address space we could memory map hundreds of GB of  
files (though we discovered an artificial limit of about 360GB.  This  
was imposed by the OS.  64 bit Solaris also has a limit like this).   
Memory mapping files like this reduces the number of memory copies  
being performed, and also allows the OS to perform its own  
optimization on disk access, using RAM as much as possible.

Others can give the details better than I can, but I believe that the  
machine had:
- Dual CPUs  (2 GHz?  I can't recall)
- 16GB RAM
- 1 TB drive array (RAID-0 I think)

64 bits is important for optimizing CPU access to RAM and disk.  The  
RAM was important to reduce disk access.  Using striped RAID was to  
maximize disk speed.  Of course, disk access is the most important  
once you start looking at hundreds of GB.

All of the performance claims (that I know of) were done using this  
machine.  It outperformed the Linux desktops by an order of magnitude.

Hope this helps.

Regards,
Paul
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