House / neighbourhood server box.

[shag]

Ok, this box will serve several users in my house and at the moment 1 neighbour. It'll be full of... things ;) . Anyway, because several users may be using this box at once, I've orderd some bits that'll hopefully keep up with the demand (I've noticed how my machine grinds a bit when having several leachers at once). It'll probably be used as a game server from time to time as well so here it is...

*updated *
2000xp (it was only $10 more so why not:p )
nforce1
512mb pc2700
wd 120jb
128mb ti4200 vivo

Right, this box won't have a monitor or keyboard/mouse. It'll just be accessed thru the network. I've been told thats easy to do using VNC. Now as for the OS, I was going to use xp pro but then I wonderd about caching. I assume thats why most servers that the big boyz use have gigs of ram. The ram is filled with the most used info from the drives right? Or something like that I assume.

So, what do I need to get the OS (whatever it is) to use the ram that way? And is it worth while doing that?

I dunno. I'm still a noob when it comes to most of this technical stuff :p

[Ragnor]

Well you can optimize the cache for filesharing and a whole bunch of other stuff with a app like Cacheman: http://www.outertech.com/index.php?_charisma_page=downloads

[cadmax]

Just my point of view but I would have 2 hdds
The read lag would be less
this is what I have seen in my server I did have 2 Seagate’s 40GB 7200rpm ATA133 in it until 1 gave up :( and now it's slower to copy files off by 5s per GB I think (I think :p )

As for the ram I would be happy with that :)
The box is only for 5 people?
I find win xp pro dose a good job

I will love to see what other people have to say

I a noob at this game to ;)

[sparkles]

ok, so what is a cache? it is a temporary storage of some data which can be accessed quickly... you can find them on cpus, hard drives, web browsers etc etc.

the point of it is to put things your going to access in a place where you can do quickly. so the theory normally goes that if you have just accessed something, you are likely to in the near future. think of a web browser cache: it stores sites you've just been to. it's the same thing for hard drives/cpu's etc...

ok, a *very* basic explanation goes something like this:

when your cpu goes to access some memory, the first place that it will look is in the on die caches (thats what the l1 and l2 caches are all about). this happens in a couple of clock cycles.

after that, it will look in your ram, and then after that it will go to the hard drive. ram takes about 50-100 clock cycles iirc, and hard drive accesses, well, a couple of milliseconds so that equates to a number of clock cycles today...

why use hard drives? everything is stored on the hard drive as it's considered "non-volatile" (still there when you turn it off).

now, to speed it up... are you going to be accessing the same data? if so, then more often than not it will be in either the cpu cache or the ram... if not, then there will be a relatively slow disc access.

how to speed up slow disc access? raid. i'm not going to go there though...

as far as your situation goes, are you likely to be accessing the same data? i suspect not, at which point more ram will help, as only the most recently accessed files will be in ram.

and as for the os, windows xp pro should be fine for what you're after. i would make a point of explicitly setting the page file size. by default windows will resize it as needed, which slows down the computer while it is happening. in a server situation, the load will vary; there will be times where a lot of people want to use it, and so while you're all trying to access things, windows will try and resize the swap file (=no fun).

sorry about the brain dump, hopefully some of this is useful for you....

[shag]

Yeah, I figured the caching thingy would still be usefull for mp3's and the likes as they are only 6mb or so a piece.

And more hd's will be added in the future as they come down in price. ;) I was also running a raido array for over a year before one of the drives started to have probs. There was a definate difference in the load times of games and apps with that :p

[sparkles]

yeah, caching will speed things up for ya, and as an added bonus you don't even have to tell windows to do it... it will anyways...

some say that's good (the speed) where as some say that's bad... for example the other day i had a power outage (or maybe it was my psu... not sure yet...). anyways... i had been adding a number of mp3's to my main directory and then to my playlist.

i saved everything, but the caching in windows meant that it didn't write it to disc... so i had to work out which ones i had just added and which ones had not been (not so easy when it was a couple of hundred files...)

god bless diff :D

[shag]

Oh now i feel silly. found those cache settings in xp under system/advanced/performance/advanced and there's the settings for memory useage. Programs or system cache:)

[Eagle32]

I just skimmed the text here so i've probably missed something... but why on earth are you looking at a ti4200 when it's going to sit in a corner with no monitor,etc. I'd just be throwing in whatever old card was lying around or buying the cheapest video card i could find.. probably some form of 4mb 2D S3 card.

[sIg]

Well, this being the cheapest ti4200 128mb VIVO
Auriga GeForce4 Ti4200 AGP 8x 128Mb DDR TV-out DVI VIVO $316.01
If you get rid of this it gives you enough $ to get something like...
AMD Athlon XP2500+ (Barton) $196.97

Which still leaves you with $270 odd to spare

Please in the unlikely case that you allready have a ti4200 going spare ignore this post.... Or give it to me

[Agent666]

you talk about optimising the cache etc......... but really the huge bottleneck will be the network so its not that important...... if you are running a gigabit network ignore this otherwise your max transfers will be like .25 times that which the HD is capable of serving data up at........ so theres no point really when large bottlenecks in the system occur elsewhere


ditto on the 4200 .... loose it....

even a GF4MX @ $100 will serve you well .....

[dumass]

maybe use the onboard nforce1 video, if it has it, but a Ti4200? you realise that will give you NO preformance boost for serving files/anything AT ALL..

even if u run game servers on it, you will just need a vid card that supports opengl/direct3d to get to the menu's (with some games)

[KingJackal]

Originally posted by dumass
even if u run game servers on it, you will just need a vid card that supports opengl/direct3d to get to the menu's (with some games)

Yeah that's probably what he was wondering.

Dude, if you run dedicated servers, you'll only need a GeForce2 MX - and even then, only that much on games with bad support ( lack of a console-based dedicated server ).

RTCW/Q3/UT/RTCW:ET/BF and more can be served off a machine with no video card if you're really ambitious. It's only the odd title that means you need a video card because they can't be bothered providing a command-line dedicated port ;).

[shag]

hehe ok, the ti4200? Cause Hans twisted my arm Only $210 I couldn't resist :p. It just means that now the box can be used for someone else to play games on if we decide to have a little lan thingy cept It's still missing a monitor mouse/keyboard...

Anyway, i'm also using this setup as a tempery computer for me till I upgrade. So that card is comming in quite useful

And what else? Ahh I was thinking I could put a second network card in there as well to share the load by having one feeding this house and one the neighbour. You can do that right? I'm sure I've heard people talk about that before. Also in the not too distant future maybe have some gigabit linkage going on :cool: the prices of the gear is steadily comming down.

This thing has just evolved a little bit from what it was origionaly intended to be but it's still there to be used as the mass storage/ server first with gaming stuff as a nice sideline :D