This requests goes out _especially_ to the 'hands dirty' developers
who are intricately familiar with where our hardware bottlenecks are
most likely to be. But anyone with solid, non-speculative ideas is
welcome to comment!
As Jason said, he bought another gig of ram -- we are planning to
basically max out the machines if that will help. That hard drive
that didn't work, well, we'll get the right one soon, and that'll help
significantly I think. Also, if I'm not mistaken, one of these
machines has a dual processor board, but only a single processor, is
that right, Jason? So that's an easy upgrade, once we find and buy
the right part.
But, imagine this: suppose I were shopping at
http://www.penguincomputing.com/, as I always do, and I wanted to
spend around $3000 on new hardware for wikipedia. Presumably, this
could either be one new kickass machine, or 2 new very nice frontend
webservers, or whatever else we think we could best use.
Given that budget, what should I buy that's most likely to give us the
best bang for the buck?
And then, of course, once we have settled on the general type of
hardware (i.e. 2 medium machines or 1 kickass machine) that will be
most useful to us, we could also extend our shopping to other
suppliers. I have used penguincomputing many times and I've been very
happy, but I'd go elsewhere if there was good reason.
--Jimbo