[cobalt-users] Maximum Ram and Disk RaQ 3

[Todd Troutman <t@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hello, a first post from me, thought I'd just comment on some
possibly useless excess ram goofing about today on a RaQ 3.

This might not be practical but is is fun.

Starting with a 128meg, 13 gig RaQ 3 I installed two 512meg
Corsair PC133 dimms. Watching it boot through the console I
see "Warning only 960MB will be used."  Top reports that it
is all actually available for use, the
full 1024 is reported in the admin GUI but 'cat /proc/meminfo'
MemTotal:    971584 kB.  So it reports ram a little scatter brained
everywhere you look. Oh well, it's still a lot for this type
of hardware.

Anyway, I was stunned that this worked.  It's not practical unless
you do something funky like use some of that ram for a filesystem,
maybe accelerator cache mode squid running on the box and put
600 meg of cache space in a memory filesystem. Something like that,
anyway, it is possible to install enough ram to make something like
that work if you need a small solid state filesystem for some
purpose.

Performance, it totally rocks now, this thing is a beast. Yes, I'm
kidding.  It's a little better but not much, at the same time as
the ram upgrade I added an 80 gig seagate ST380021A.  The
usual tricks from Toby Miller's post on July 18 (search "Toby Experience")
Except that I was never able to umount /home by stopping services
and had to boot single user.

I do realize that now I have bottle necks in various other parts of
the system causing all this ram and disk to be of minimal impact to
performance, but hey, like it said, it was just for kicks.

Todd