Old Dual Pentium III 500Mhz Servers

[David Timms]

On 11/10/2009 09:40 AM, Aaron Gray wrote:
> I have two old servers Dual Pentium III 500Mhz and have just replaced
> two older single CPU Pentium III 500Mhz machines.
>
> I had FC4 and FC5 on the older servers.
>
> Now have F11 on the two newer machines.
I would say the same for an old pentium II 366 notebook (512MB). The 
Fedora 3 or so that was around when it first received a linux distro was 
much snappier than F10 (the most recent one I tried).

Things to think about:
- if you are talking about the same machine, disk drive tiredness would 
have reduced the access speed that you can achieve, when r/w to disk.

- fans may be worn, running slowly, and noisily, leading to poor cooling 
of components and temp sensors kicking in to reduce clock rates.

- the kernel is general purpose, and aimed for the most common machine 
that it will get put on eg see stats: (and ram, cache sizes types speed).
http://www.smolts.org/static/stats/stats.html

- stack hardening / etc in libraries / compiled programs

- security updates adding proper checking of eg received/entered strings 
etc - just more processing to be done (that should have been done in the 
original release, but was instead added over time as security analysis 
showed poor handling)

- selinux (was it in and on, active in your older release) ?

- defaulting to use of layered storage (ie lvm) in newer releases ?

- audio - possibly biggest CPU killer is runtime audio dsp mixing (eg an 
old machine just passed audio data to the sound card, and it was 
attenuated there before output - might have been 1-2% cpu. same machine 
playing back audio now might used 30-50% cpu.

- more stuff that instead of using fd's to pass information, instead 
using other methods like dbus calls with xml like data to encode then 
decode.

- more stuff relying on storage/retrieval of information from 
inefficient storage formats like xml

- more web sites assuming you have fast CPU, infinite bandwidth, and 
infinite monthly download limits, leading to sites:
   - filled with far too many ads (firefox adblock)
   - far to much active content like flash (flashblock)
   - far too many stat, counting, tracking connections to make

- familiarity with faster machines changing your perceptions of speed.

- Fedora joining of Fedora and Extras, increasing the size of metadata 
dl needed for updates etc. (although with better caching methods, and 
some optimized parsing).

If we consider moore's law saying we'll get a doubling of CPU 
performance every 18 months, the corollary must be we'll bloat our os 
and applications to at least exceed the above as operational 
requirements; end result is actual decline in capability over time...

If you have two identical machines: you might be in the best position to 
do direct A-B comparisons of same hardware, different OS. Get the 
stopwatch out, what type of things take longer/shorter ?

I am sure others can think of more excuses why same machine would be 
slower with newer OS.

DaveT.