[ale] [OT] Laptop Battery Worth It?

[David Tomaschik]

On Thu, Jul 14, 2011 at 5:10 PM, Pat Regan <thehead at patshead.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Jul 2011 13:56:48 -0400
> David Tomaschik <david at systemoverlord.com> wrote:
>
>> Maybe I'm just in the wrong place financially... no way I could afford
>> that hardware.  My current desktop is a C2D @ 2.0 GHz with 6GB of RAM,
>> dual 1TB drives in RAID-1 and a GeForce 8400GT.  It slows to a grind
>> under even 2 VMs running on it, and that's with a minimal Debian
>> install in the VMs.
>
> If you're building your own, those 6 core machines don't have to be
> terribly expensive.  The 6 core AMD CPUS work in the same motherboards
> as single core chips.

Yeah, I'd probably need to look at that some more after I resolve my
laptop issue.  :)  I wasn't aware prices on AMD CPUs had dropped as
much as they had.  It's been ~1 year since I last looked at desktop
hardware much.

>
> I don't know what you're doing in your virtual machines.  I wouldn't
> even expect to be able to notice that a handful of mostly idle virtual
> machines are running in the background on your hardware.  Can you tell
> us more about what you're running?

My virtual machines are typically LAMP and/or Tomcat-type
applications, though I've had opportunity to run some Ruby and Python
webapps as well.  I'm also trying to set myself up to get a SSCP, so
there's some information security things going on as well.
(Pentesting mainly on those VMs -- not generating rainbow tables or
anything.)  I've also done some playing around with IPv6, DNSSEC, etc.

Mostly I *think* it's RAM & I/O that's causing me trouble.  I had the
misfortune of picking poor hard drives (great prices though) and so my
I/O lacks terribly, even in RAID-1.  (Software RAID-1.)

>> I currently have 1 Linode that I use to host my website, git
>> repositories, and a few other things, but that's a mere Linode-512.
>> At times, it's already stretched on RAM.
>
> A long time ago I used to run Apache, PostgreSQL, bind, Sendmail, and
> pop3ad on a vps with 96 meg of ram.  The only thing that needed a good
> bit of tweaking was pg.
>
> Pat

I'm running Drupal 7 on nginx & mysql, irssi, bind, dovecot, postfix,
and a few other tools on there.  I think tools now have a tendency to
ask for more RAM than they did before -> boosts performance on cheap
RAM, but makes them less compact.


-- 
David Tomaschik, RHCE, LPIC-1
System Administrator/Open Source Advocate
OpenPGP: 0x5DEA789B
http://systemoverlord.com
david at systemoverlord.com