Re: Upgrade existing machine or buy new?

[DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Short answer: NEW.

As has been mentioned there are several reasons to retire the 170:

1) CPU Spin. It doesn't. It will support 5250 apps all day long and 
perform reasonably doing so but as mentioned even backups and such are 
getting slow. Web serving and PHP will run out of gas el-quicko.
2) Mem Size. If it's your basic 170 1GB is the max. This won't be 
enough. Larger 170s got up to 4GB but that's it.
3) Disk. With 25GB of Disk it most likely has only 4 7200 RPM 8GB disk 
units on a RAID card with 40MB Cache. No speed in evidence. Best the 170 
can do is 10 10kRPM disks on a 100MB Cache RAID card. Even then it's on 
an older slower 32 bit PCI bus.
4) LAN. Even Frankie, a 170 overbuilt with 45 10K RPM Drives on 3 100MB 
Cache RAID cards and 4GB RAM can't keep a 100MB Ethernet card above 
about 60% busy with such simple things as FTP. There is no GbE option 
for the 170 as it would be pointless anyway.
5) O/S. No Supported O/S is available for the 170. And while you can 
shoehorn PHP onto V5R3 it's not a supported environment anyway.

Only advice I would give on a new machine is not to skimp on disk arms. 
Sure you can configure one with two drives mirrored and no Cache 
yielding 140 GB usable storage, however you end up with abysmal 
performance as the CPU spends it's entire life waiting for those poor 
disk units. Put in half a dozen or 8 and with the RAID cache. You will 
have more storage than you need but the thing can breath.

 - DrFranken.

On 2/22/2010 1:20 PM, James Rich wrote:
> Hi everyone,
>
> I have a customer that has a 9406-170 with 256MB main storage and 25.770GB
> disk storage.  This system is fine for the 25 or so concurrent users most
> of the time.  Now we are going to install a web application using Zend.
> When we run our web app on that system, it is too slow.  The customer is
> considering a new System i for this reason.  What would be the best use of
> their money, buy a new System i or upgrade the RAM and add more disk?
>
> They currently are as near as makes no difference to 100% disk usage.  The
> daily close and backup is taking about 40 minutes longer than they would
> like.  They are on v5r3m0.  An important software factor when considering
> v6 and beyond is that they are heavy users of WRKQRY and that isn't going
> to change.
>
> Best suggestions?
>
> James Rich
>
> if you want to understand why that is, there are many good books on
> the design of operating systems. please pass them along to redmond
> when you're done reading them :)
>   	- Paul Davis on ardour-dev
>