Recommended hardware

Hello,

I am running RT on a small machine now, but have been tasked with
upgrading the hardware to improve performance as it becomes more visible
outside of my department.

We are a solaris shop, I run apache with mod_perl, all RT-related
software is up-to-date (as of 2 weeks ago).

So, my question is this. When looking at new hardware, what are the
hardware parameters that are considered most important for RT
performance?

Is there much value in multiple CPU’s?
I’ve seen RAM stated as pretty key to performance on this list.
Any recommendations regarding disk I/O?

Obviously, I’d like to purchase the biggest baddest box available, but
this project is fairly skunkworks so my budget’s not that great.

thanks much!
rick

Rick Rezinas
Unix Systems Administrator
Qsent, Inc.

Is there much value in multiple CPU’s?
I’ve seen RAM stated as pretty key to performance on this list.
Any recommendations regarding disk I/O?

Obviously, I’d like to purchase the biggest baddest box available, but
this project is fairly skunkworks so my budget’s not that great.

My experience is RAM is most important, followed by disk speed/reliability.

If you have frequent tape backups, don’t worry about disk so much. If you
don’t have frequent backups, hardware RAID that mirrors the disk(s) may be a
good idea in case a disk blows out. Otherwise, you will lose all ticket
data, new or handled, since the last backup.

In the immortal words of Rick Rezinas (rick.rezinas@qsent.com):

Is there much value in multiple CPU’s?

Some: RT-qua-RT isn’t particularly multithreaded, but apache (and its
children) and mysqld will contend for CPU time.

I’ve seen RAM stated as pretty key to performance on this list.

Yes. Luckily, RAM is cheap: max it out if you possibly can.

Any recommendations regarding disk I/O?

My experience is that I tended to hit RAM and CPU limitations first,
but YMMV.

Obviously, I’d like to purchase the biggest baddest box available, but
this project is fairly skunkworks so my budget’s not that great.

Don’t use Solaris or Sun/Sparc hardware then. :frowning: (And especially
don’t buy RAM from Sun.)

-n

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“This Purple Vengence Version with Power Fist and Nuclear Knees is in rare,
never-been-seen condition, making it highly collectable!” --Sheen
http://blank.org/memory/-----------------------------------------------------

Hello,

I am running RT on a small machine now, but have been tasked with
upgrading the hardware to improve performance as it becomes more visible
outside of my department.

We are a solaris shop, I run apache with mod_perl, all RT-related
software is up-to-date (as of 2 weeks ago).

So, my question is this. When looking at new hardware, what are the
hardware parameters that are considered most important for RT
performance?

SUN has a tutorial on RT on their bigadmin website.
Some days/weeks ago, someone from SUN posted a hardware-setup for their
internal RT setup.

IIRC, 2*R420, fully spec’ed …
If you have the money, go for it :wink:

You can always buy one of their Dual-Xeons or new Opterons and use
Solaris x86 - I’m pretty sure, they’ll be able to help you with that,
too.

Rainer