[SOLVED] Slackware Server Questions

xspartan · 05-25-2011, 06:09 PM

I run a small web server on Slackware (Lamp+Drupal). Mostly it's a hobby for me. The server hardware is an old Athlon XP 1500+ with 2 GB RAM. Which version of Slackware do you think that it's better for this hardware? Slackware 13.37? An older one? Maybe a version with kernel 2.4? Which one do you think is the best for my old cpu and under heavy load-traffic-use? And a last difficult and very generic question...
How many visitors do you think that this server can handle?

MS3FGX · 05-25-2011, 06:42 PM

There is rarely a reason to run anything but the latest Slackware, and absolutely no reason to run a 2.4 kernel on a modern system...ever.

Your hardware is very far from the point where 2.4 might be less intensive. We're talking about 200 MHz or slower machines.

cfdisk · 05-25-2011, 11:40 PM

Quote:

The server hardware is an old Athlon XP 1500+ with 2 GB RAM

You can fire up virtualization on your hardware and sell unlimited VPS for $5 a pop.

On the serious note, see http://www.slackware.com/

Quote:

Curious about the machine running this site, eh? Also fairly high on the importance scale (for this site, anyway) is the box itself. The machine is a Pentium III, 600 MHz, with 512 megabytes of RAM. It runs (of course) Slackware Linux, and does an efficient and reliable job even with moderately old hardware. The slackware.com site has been known to run for well over a year without a reboot.

TL_CLD · 05-26-2011, 12:17 AM

I'd say go with the latest Slackware, and for some basic load tests you can use the ab tool.

zordrak · 05-26-2011, 02:46 AM

1. 13.37
2. More than you're going to get.

I've had Slack (12.2) running on a corporate webserver on not-dissimilar hardware for many years. This includes more than one database application and constant use by large numbers of visitors. It's been faultless.

xspartan · 05-26-2011, 02:52 PM

I thought that maybe older Slackware versions would consume less memory. Usually older software take less RAM. It seems that i was wrong!

MS3FGX · 05-26-2011, 03:57 PM

That is a concept largely cultivated by Microsoft software. The rule that newer software requires faster and faster hardware to execute does not hold true in Unix operating systems.

xspartan · 05-27-2011, 07:06 AM

All the answers were very helpful, so thank you.Marking this as solved.

unclejed613 · 05-27-2011, 08:01 AM

i'm running my machine with an asterisk server, http server, smb server, and kde, and 13.37 seems to have a smaller memory "footprint" than 13.0 did, so yeah i would have to agree that the "bigger, faster, newer" lie doesn't apply to 'nix, even WITH kde running

acummings · 05-28-2011, 12:14 AM

Quote:

hardware is an old Athlon XP 1500+ with 2 GB RAM.

:-) Gosh you might have enuff ram for a VM with a server in the VM and another server in the host O.S.

Run it without the X server -- log in to it via network/lan from another box that runs X (whenever the need to do maintenance which is *extremely* rare with Slackware). And you'll have an http server that will stand up to quite a few (quite many, actually) simultaneous page hits.

--
Alan.