[Gllug] Sun hardware/firewall memory

[Ben Fitzgerald]

On Mon, Dec 20, 2004 at 08:38:38PM +0000, Adrian McMenamin wrote:
> I suppose this is marginally off topic, but...something to ponder.
> 
> The Sparcstation 20 box I bought a few weeks ago for a fiver doesn't
> appear to do much better in published benchmarks than a simple pre-mmx
> pentium system that would have cost 50 - 75% less than the sparc when it
> was manufactured.

If the system you are talking about is this one here:

http://sunsolve.sun.com/handbook_pub/Systems/SS20/SS20.html

It has ECC memory. What's the cache size on the processor you have?
I believe the sparcstation 20 has 8kb L1 and 256kb L2. The bus is
100Mhz.

> So, what is so great about the Sparc that it cost so much more? To be
> honest my impression is that it is a better box than, say the Pentium
> 166 that is my firewall (which probably gets better benchmarks), but
> then it does have 192 MB as opposed to the 48 MB on the firewall.

The hardware is proprietary. If you have a solaris run shop you will
pay what sun want, so they charge higher prices. This is one reason
sun are on their knees, IMHO :)

> Then, second query: thanks to the end of lifing of a pentium 120 I can
> upgrade the firewall/router to 64 MB. Is it worth the hassle?
> 
> The firewall/router does nothing these days, except, err route or not
> route. It doesn't use 48MB, so what do I get out of 64MB

Why not monitor vmstat outupt and see if you ever dip into your swap?
If so, extra memory will help.

Ben

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