[Koha] FAQ (final?)

[Simon Blake]

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).
> 
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Koha mailing list
> Koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
> http://lists.katipo.co.nz/mailman/listinfo/koha

-- 
Simon Blake                                             simon at katipo.co.nz 
Katipo Communications                                       +64 21 402 004