HI

For years i have proudly used my linux server and now it´s time give my "most stable box in my home" a upgrade.

As time passed by i have made some upgrades to storage but never to the core system.

I use my server mostly for a fileserver FTP,Samba etc and this is how looks today


SPEC
-----------------------------------
CPU: Celeron 633 mhz (66)
MEM: 398 MB
NETWORK: 2 x 10/100 Ethernet
STORAGE: 4 x 120 Segate ata 100 @ promise ata 100 controler (2port)
USERS: 3 + FTP USERS

I noticed that i make a lot of transfer between my server and workstaions so if hokking the system to gigabit it would give to very large filetransfers some help on the way.

So i bought a moterboard with i875 chipset for p4/celeron with serial ata and gigabit though the northbirdge. I replaced my drives with serial ata.

here how the new confiq should look like

CPU ? intel celeron 2,4 ghz or Pentium 4 2.4 HT
MEMORY: DDR 3200 512 MB
NETWORK: 2 x 10/100 Ethernet + 1000 mbit onboard.
STORAGE: 4 x SATA SEGATE 120 GB @ Onboard SATA controler.

So now to my big question ? Would a P4 make big inpact on my system vs the cheap celeron? As i sad before i will be useing ftp/samba/gigabit and x for server monitoring.

I appreciate any input !!

No, with a server that's under that kind of light load a Celeron or a P4 won't make much difference. I would even claim the 633MHz Celeron would be good enough.


Håkan

To make use of hyperthreading, you will have to install an SMP kernel
and eventually recompile device drivers. If CPU load gets too high, try
increasing the packet size for the network. This is known as MTU and
MRU for the ifconfig command. On the windows machines accessing
via samba, you might have to hack the registry to increase packet size.

Simplest approach: Buy the celeron (or the AMD competition), install
a standard single CPU kernel. If your CPU is too highly loaded, increase
the packet size.

Increasing packet size will not work. You will get more lost packets. This will make a sluggish server. Decreasing the packet size will make a server very responsive. On many of my systems I got good results lowering the packet size to 1000.

The 1 gigabit ethernet will not work on PCI with a 32 bit bus going at 33 MHz because it can only transfer 133 megabytes in theory. In the real world conditions it will transfer a little over 60 megabytes per second. I hope you got the motherboard that uses the CSA for the gigabit ethernet because it moves 266 megabytes per second. The only motherboard brands that I can think of is ASUS and Gigabyte has CSA for gigabit ethernet.

Why you want to run an X Window Server because that will slow you down. Find command line programs or telnet using ssh into the server and find out what the server is doing. From the kernel you get a lot of information about the filesystem and devices if you have compiled for those options.

I don't know what kind of internet connection you have but 1 gigabit is good enough for anything. Is 119 megabytes per second fast enough for you.

Hi thx for the input.

I bought the GIGABYTE GA-8KNXP and it has SCA all the way What i dont understand how my performace will benfit from this as the nic is connected to my intranet. Well i guess cache reads maybe can help some but my hardrives will never hit anything over 60 mb/s as said. The primary funktion of my box is filserver i guess samba will try to cache open files and so on.
My outside connection to the internet is 50 mbit Vdsl line.