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SubjectRe: Building Big Ass Linux Machine, what are the limits?
Hi,

On Thu, 24 Sep 1998 22:48:39 -0400, Jim McQuillan <jam@McQuil.com> said:

> Some are telling me that I should be looking at big hardware, such
> as HP9000, SGI or Sun. The type of equipment that would cost upwards of
> $100k.

> I want to try it with Linux.

> - 512mb ram. Can I go bigger?, whats the max?
> Current system has 512mb and is only using about 300mb of it.

The current kernel will get upset once physical memory starts to
approach 1GB. There are patches to extend that to 2GB. We know how to
eliminate that barrier for future kernels, but don't count on it any
time soon.

> - 4 Adaptec 2940UW Host adaptors with 4-4gb Ultra wide disks on each.
> 16 drives total. Isn't there a limit on number of scsi disks?

16 in kernels prior to yesterday; linux-2.1.123 finally integrates the
patches to raise that to 128 separate disks.

> Will I run into a maximum on the number of processes that can run?

The process limit (256 processes) is a compile-time constant which you
can raise by rebuilding the kernel. It is pretty much the last such
hard-limit in 2.2, by the way: the other limits on swap partition size,
number of filesystems, number of scsi disks, number of signals and
number of file descriptors per process have all been eliminated
(although the fd limit patches have not yet been integrated into the
mainline 2.1 tree).

The most significant limit remaining in 2.2 is the 2GB limit on
individual file size.

> I have about 45-60 days to do this, Should I be waiting for the 2.2
> Kernel or do you think the latest 2.0.xx kernel can handle it?

2.0 should work just fine, but 2.2 will be a _lot_ faster under that
sort of load.

--Stephen

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