[oclug] The power of OSS/GNU/Linux

[Shad Young]

I had an opportunity to engage in a debate with a fellow about the power of
Linux the other day. After I had begun to outline the virtues of the Linux
environment I began to recall the enormity of what one machine could do.

The machine:
unbelievably a K6 233 with 64 MB EDO RAM
7 Gig Quantum HDD
2 realtek 10baseT
Cheapo hub.
no video card (except during setup of X)
no keyboard
no mouse

Services:
Red Hat 6.2 with Kernel 2.2.6
Fully configured Apache 1.3/CGI/Perl/PHP with a dozen websites averaging
10,000 hits a month
BIND running 10 or so domains.
Qmail with 30 accounts
MySQL with webmin for a web forum
exported X for remote administration (sorry I am a gui person)
KDE 1
full development suite
six online games in active development
2 on-line games operational with 10 to thirty players at any given time
24 active accounts for developers and programmers with 2 or three logged on
at any given time.

all that and my users were constantly amazed at its speed. Recompiling their
game modules usually took minutes; and this from guys who developed in
windows on 1 gig Athlons at home. (game runners would complain about the lag
when recompiling a kernel, but that's about it).

I was going for an OCLUG record uptime and was on day 303, when our favorite
Catholic evangelist logged on and used Netscape (I forgot to uninstall the
stock version) which had an enormous memory leak. Nothing I tried would get
this machine to respond as it filled up the memory and 512 megs of swap
space and began to loop. My girlfriend thought I had hurt myself when I
screamed in despair after I realized a hard shutdown was required. It took
literally an hour to respond to one keystroke as it swapped and swapped and
swapped ROFL. I could have killed you Francis ;).

I would also like to thank Olaf Baumann and obone.ca for providing me with a
development platform and host for my current project. It is giving me an
opportunity to learn about Debian in the process.


Cheers
Shad
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