[p4] Server hardware requirements (again)? - Chuck Karish - com.perforce.perforce-user

4 messages in com.perforce.perforce-user[p4] Server hardware requirements (ag...

From	Sent On	Attachments
Dan Kegel	15 Aug 2002 14:40
Chuck Karish	15 Aug 2002 19:17
Paul C. Pharr	15 Aug 2002 19:32
Arnt Gulbrandsen	15 Aug 2002 23:12

Subject:	[p4] Server hardware requirements (again)?
From:	Chuck Karish (kar...@well.com)
Date:	08/15/2002 07:17:26 PM
List:	com.perforce.perforce-user

At 02:41 PM 8/15/2002 -0700, Dan Kegel wrote:

Have any of you needed more than just a single 1.4GHz Pentium III CPU, and if so, what kind of load are you putting on the perforce server?

Here's the background: we're about to switch 60 developers from Source Safe to Perforce (huzzah!). Now the question is, what hardware to buy for the server?

Our source tree contains about 20 thousand files; the SourceSafe database is about 20 gigabytes in size. (Hmm, 1 megabyte per file seems a bit much, maybe I'm wrong about the number of files.)

It's probably safe to assume the 20GB archive won't grow more than 3x in the next two years, right? And Perforce's database should be roughly the same size as SourceSafe's, right? So 60GB is probably safe.

The Perforce metadata will take up extra disk space. It might be up to five or ten gigabytes in a couple of years. Both metadata growth rate and CPU requirements vary with usage. Will your team grow? Do they routinely perform operations that pull lots of files from the server?

That document also claims that Perforce servers don't use a lot of CPU, but http://www.perforce.com/perforce/technotes/note058.html mentions that large sites might want dual CPUs. I imagine our 60 users and 20,000 active
files don't qualify us as a large site, but what if our normal practice was to do a full forced update of the source tree every day?

How big is the source tree, and how many users would do full updates?

It kind of looks like Dell's entry-level server for this kind of thing is the 2550 with Red Hat Linux, a 1.4GHz Pentium III, 512MB RAM, 3 36GB 10000RPM SCSI3 drives (at RAID 5, that would provide a total of 72GB of storage space), and a cheap (on-motherboard) RAID controller. Total: $3700.

This server is roughly the right size for now. Perforce forks lots of server processes that work concurrently, so it can make good use of a multiprocessor system.

If you were using raw disks rather than a RAID you'd want to put the metadata, the swap area, and the data files on separate disk spindles. That's reportedly not as important if you have a good RAID system.