On Wed, 2002-10-23 at 15:41, Doug Eubanks wrote:
>
> Is anyone using the Release-1.2pre1 RedHat Installer in production? I
> have been using the installers for quite a while now and I need to redo a
> server (that gets quite a bit of load) and I HATE EXT3. I was hoping to
> get some feedback from someone who has used this version with RH8
If you don't really need XFS on the root partition, you might as well
use the original RH installer, create just /boot, the swap and a small
root partition (say, 1GB or depending on your system needs) and leave
the rest unpartitioned.
Install the OS, then get the kernel RPMs and utilities from oss.sgi.com,
install them, boot the new kernel, create and format the XFS partitions,
and you're done.
I did this experiment, it works without any problems. And usually you're
not concerned with the root partition, since the real work is always
done someplace else. ;-)
I subscribe to what Chris Tooley said. RH 8.0 is a major change, so
potentially some things might get broken after the upgrade. Therefore,
you have to do three things before proceeding: test, test and test. For
mission-critical apps you may want to be as conservative as you can.
On the other hand, performance-wise, 8.0 brings an unexpected but very
welcome leap: the machine simply feels a lot faster under multiple
concurrent CPU-intensive tasks. Could be the HZ=512 thing in the kernel,
could be the newer gcc and glibc, could be a combination of these and/or
more.
Anyway, for example, while running transcode (a versatile, threaded
video encoder/decoder) on RH7.3 to convert a stream from MPEG2 to DivX,
the desktop was sluggish, the mouse felt like "pushing through molasses"
and the big applications (Evolution, Gimp) were generally slow (no
wonder, 'cause transcode is typically running several threads on my
single-CPU machine, each thread taking care of a video operation:
resize, clip, codec conversion, etc.). But use the same software on 8.0
and do the same tasks, and you almost can't tell there's a CPU hog on
your system anymore. Well, almost.
I also suspect that the applications that do a lot of stuff in a big
select() loop (i.e. Squid) might see a significant performance boost.
And i expect improvements for machines running lots of processes
simultaneously. I didn't run real benchmarks though, so take my words
with the recommanded grain of salt.
It might be interesting to see more tests with XFS and RH 8.0. The
environment definitely feels different (and i'm not talking here about
the desktop ;-) ).
--
Florin Andrei
Many would-be screenwriters seem to have the impression that they can
write a script based only on an idea. This is similar to the impression
that many had during the "dot-com" era that they could get venture
capital for an idea. (Many did, of course, but that's another story.)
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