[ale] KDE, Gnome, XFCE OT?

[DJ-Pfulio]

Supporting 200 email accounts on a 512MB box is possible.

Certainly there are times when more CPU/RAM is needed, but most servers
in most data centers run at 13% utilization. Why?  "Bigger is better"
syndrome.  That includes 5% for systems monitoring. ;)  I've heard of
people using 2G of RAM as a minimal VM. Sounds like the team would
rather blow more RAM than tune for actual needs. Sometimes that is
needed as a rough starting point for green-field deployments ... but if
that is true then why do Amazon and GoDaddy offer multiple, smaller,
system sizes?  Why?

I would never try to put a geospatial DB on 2G of RAM. 32G of RAM is
more like it for that need.

There are methods to reduce CPU/RAM loading that aren't used enough.
Micro-caching, for example.  Caching results for 5 seconds at a time
doesn't impact the end user much, if at all, but reduces the DB load
hugely on primarily read-data. Transactional DB requirements are
different. There are other times when more RAM is needed too. Impossible
to say all the different times when more RAM is needed, but assuming
more RAM is the solution is wasteful.

There are 3 main things to watch when deploying a system:
* RAM use (including VM)
* CPU use
* I/O (network, disk, etc)
I've seen people assume that more RAM will solve a CPU issue. It won't,
but it might solve an I/O issue (if swapping is the problem).  This
isn't rocket science.

If the system is doing 10K TPS, a ballpark guess isn't sufficient. Real
data and facts are necessary to properly architect the total solution -
to include transactions, read-mainly requests, DR, and reporting.


On 03/28/2016 08:28 AM, Lightner, Jeff wrote:
> No server needs more than 2 GB unless running Java?!
> 
> That maybe true for small front end web servers but if you're doing
> major DBs or APPs 2 GB is NOT plenty even if they're not Java based.
> Even more active web servers use more than 2 GB.