Re: Is there a way to use Linux on the E450 ?

* Juergen Sievers:

But the system has four 400 Sparc processors each with 1Gygabyte RAM

So what? Even four 400MHz USII processors are just that - 400MHz USII processors...

and 6x 10.000 rpm SCSI drives.

Well, 10krpm say nothing about performance. Especally older 10k and 15k SCSI drives have a much lower data density than slower drives (7200rpm SCSI and even 7200rpm ATAPI), resulting in a lower sustained throughput. The only thing that did benefit from the high RPM were the access times which in most standard situations don't help overall performance.

And don't forget that this dinosaur has only UW-SCSI busses which have a theroetical(!) max throughput of 40MB/s - per bus! In the E450 a bus is shared amongst several drives, thus even more limiting the performance.

It should be as fast as a normal single
Pentium system.

A Pentium system of today? Forget it!

An E450 with single USII 400MHz does 17.4 SPECint95 and 25.7 SPECfp95. To give you a rough figure, a Dell Precision 610 with 450MHz PentiumII XEON does 18.8 SPECint95 and 14.6 SPECfp, and a Pentium3 600MHz in a Dell Precision 420 does 30 SPECint95 and 27.7 SPECfp95. So your 400MHz USII is _around_ as fast as a Pentium2 XEON 450MHz in integer operations (which are most tasks out there including your webserving application) and a bit slower than a Pentium3 600MHz in floating point (the P3 is almost as double as fast as your 400MHz USII in integer ops!). Of course these are just rough figures, but it should give you some house numbers.

Of course four 400MHz CPUs don't give you an equivalent of a 1600MHz processor. It just means you can have four tasks running in parallel, but all limited to the 400MHz CPU performance. If your application doesn't make use of multiple processors then you're just wasting energy.

http://de.sun.com/company/press-releases/1998/PM98_77.html

"Sun Enterprise 450 Server mit neuem 400 MHz UltraSPARC-II Prozessor
übertrifft alle Systeme mit Windows NT beim SPECWeb Benchmark"

Yeah, right, in _1998_ which was _8_ years ago (the 400MHz E450 was already 1997 available in other countries, Germany got it delayed)! Every lowend Sempron/Athlon64/Pentium4 system from today is faster than your dinosaur, and also consumes way less power!

I don't want to say that the machine can't handle the task you want to use it for, but it looks like you are expecting more than what is realistic from such an old system. And even if it does the job, the power requirements usually make it very unattractive for most server tasks as the performance per power consumption is very low. In the end getting a newer machine that is faster and also much more economical usually is the much more cost effective way. Most of used E450s are bought by hobbyists that use it as toy or for occasional use. Simply because having it running all day is too expensive. And thats btw also the reason most business owners are getting rid of these beasts (or already have done so)...

Benjamin
.

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