[svlug] swapping motherboards

[Greg Herlein]

> and people start looking at our website a lot?  Will this old,
> wheezing AMD K6-2 300 be enough to handle it?"  And, I figure, it
> won't.

You may want to do some engineering to answer that question for
real.  I bet you will be surprised by what a  K6-2 300 can
do.  Depending on what you are serving up (dynamic verses static,
database etc) you can really hammer a lot through an older
system.  Look at what you are connected to as well: if you have a
small pipe to the world all you have to support is the ability to
saturate that pipe.  :)

On the other hand, swapping the motherboard/CPU/memory out and
just keeping the existing disks should be a no brainer.  I will
say that you may want to look at the disks anyway though, since
if you *really* have a heavy I/O load going then that may very
well be yoru first bottleneck anyway.  You might get a whole lot
more bang for your dollar upgrading to a few SCSI disks and
a SCSI controller and plannign your use of spindles
appropriately.

It's crazy, this horspower proliferation.  I just
(finally!) upgraded from a K6-II/500 desktop to a Athalon/1.6GHz
with DDR RAM... and while it is much much faster, I think that
for server use the old box with a SCSI disk would compete in most
scenarios.

Greg