Hi Nicholas On Mon, Nov 19, 2001 at 02:15:00PM -0500, Nicholas Stephen Rosasco said:

My remaining questions/want to adds are: What is the hardware for the HLT, CMSD sites? (more info is better)

HLT runs on a dual PIII 1Ghz machine, with 1Gb of RAM and mirrored Maxtor 20Gb 7200rpm disks. The machine runs Debian Linux "woody" (the testing distribution). The box also does samba file serving for about 20 PC's, and runs the local DNS, SMTP and POP daemons. My perception, however, is that this is overpowered - under normal operations, the box doesn't show load at all, it's only under adhoc reporting that it stretches it's legs at all: 10:30:51 up 36 days, 17:18, 4 users, load average: 0.37, 0.21, 0.19 91 processes: 90 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped CPU states: 4.8% user, 1.2% system, 0.0% nice, 94.0% idle Mem: 901368K total, 775704K used, 125664K free, 50120K buffers Swap: 2097136K total, 0K used, 2097136K free, 450676K cached The reason that we have such a large(ish) box is that we had lots of problems with the previous box (an Athlon 600 with WD disks) throwing UDMA disk problems when it went under load, causing data corruption. We had the Athlon because the server before that (a K6 400) ran the database *and* about six copies of Netscape 4.77 for linux (for the diskless opacs). Every so often, Netscape would go nova, stealing all available RAM and CPU, which rendered the K6/400 fairly insensible. So we split the tasks, and put Koha on the Athlon - however, Koha did run fine on a K6/400 with 384Mb of RAM, when Netscape wasn't being a resource hog. Were I specing a new box for Koha, given current prices I'd put as much RAM as I could into the machine - 1.5Gb of RAM costs (I assume) around US$100-150 at the moment, and with that much RAM in the box, most of the Koha database will be in memory rather than on disk, and this does brilliant things for the performance of MySQL. So, lots of RAM is crucial, and then as much CPU and disk performance as you can afford. Bear in mind that Koha will work fine on a low spec machine (say, a Pentium 150 with 32Mb RAM), it'll just be slow, and the slowness will increase as usage increases. So you can run it up on most any machine that can run mysql and apache, and see how it goes, and if it's to slow then you can throw money at the problem until you get the performance you want. You'll need to tune Mysql to use all that RAM, here's what Chris has in the mysql config at the moment: set-variable = key_buffer=256M set-variable = max_allowed_packet=1M set-variable = table_cache=256 set-variable = sort_buffer=1M set-variable = record_buffer=1M set-variable = myisam_sort_buffer_size=64M set-variable = thread_cache=8 Make sure, also, that your disks are setup correctly, with the highest possible DMA support - hdparm is your friend. I'd observe, also, that long term Koha should get faster, and thus need less resource to run it - there are some fairly inefficient table structures in Koha, a hangover from the previous system HLT ran, and as these get ironed out and removed, I'd expect Koha to get quicker. Feel free to edit this down into the FAQ in whatever way you like. Cheers Si

Who at Katipo, HLT, and elsewhere have contributed? I'd like to add a credits section (I'll probably create a seperate acknowledgement list for FAQ suggestors).

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