Recommended hardware for SCO 5.0.6

[wizzer]

I'm currently running a 32 user system where the users using text based applications telnetting into the server. Howerver increases in the amount of activity have led to the response of the server becoming slower, so i think it's time to upgrade.

At the moment we are running a dual P3 550Mhz system with 1GB of memory and raid5 scsi drives.

I'm trying to decide what hardware to go for in a new server. I will be sticking with SCO 5.0.6 cause it does everything i need of it for the time being. The main question is - should i go multi-cpu again, or just go for a single high-speed processor? Obviously the main argument for not going dual-processor is the cost. But if i can get substantially better performance from, say 1x 3GHz Xeon processor machine than i've got at the moment, there's probably not much point in me getting a 2x 3Ghz Xeon system!

Would anyone care to make any observations about the choices available to me?

Regards
James R Wilson

 

[PHV]

Anyway, on P4 and Xeon machines you must absolutely apply the rs506a patch.

 

[motoslide]

I'd absolutely go single-processor. Spend that extra money on a faster disk subsystem instead. I've seen remarkable speed improvement by going with RAID-1 instead of RAID-5.
A problem you may encounter is getting drivers for current hardware which will work with that older OS.

 

[Annihilannic]

It depends a lot on the performance profile of your system? Is it CPU bound or I/O bound (i.e. at the busiest times are the users' processes waiting for CPU time or for I/Os to complete)?

Annihilannic.

 

[eyedoc1975]

Dear James,
I would suggest Newer hardware with a faster front side
Bus and a Xeon CPU with a larger 2Meg secondary cache. Also choose 15K RPM SCSI drives on ultra320 SCSI. In addition go for 2 gig DDR-2 memory. One model I think is
IBM e series Model 226 in various configerations.
I hope that this will help.

 

[stanhubble]

I agree with Anni....forget what is available....almost anything new today will outperform what you are currently running. use the tools available (sar, top, u386mon|cpqmon) to determine where the bottleneck is and then maximize your investment in that area (disk, network card, memory, cpu).
what you will find thou is that you may need to upgrade to at least 5.0.7 to find drivers for the new hardware. You should still be able to get 5.0.7 until june-july without having to go to 6. you also may not need to upgrade if you are network bound or disk bound. gigabit ethernet or 15K drives in raid 1 will go a long way for not much money.