Server Project

[cda]

/

[ppietro]

So here's my situation, I have a school project to make a server on an intranet (not intTERnet lol), the project says it has to be fast, cheep and able to handle 2000+ people at any given time. Rather than go through all the work of trying to set it up, is it even worth hosting it on my PS3? I read that there's only one core available to linux and it's only 3.2 GHz, is there any workaround to get the cells involved in processing?

The Cell processor on the PS3 has a PowerPC core - a single core, dual threaded, moderately fast, in-order processor - and 6 Vectorized Floating point calculators. Binary code developed for the PowerPC core - known as the Power Processing Element or PPE - can not be executed on a Vector calculator - known as a Synergistic Processing Element or SPE.

Linux runs on the PPE, but it can use up to 6 of the 7 SPEs on the PS3's Cell. However - it's not a simple matter of throwing a compiler switch to engage them. The PPE and SPEs are not binary compatible - you have to use a separate compiler for each.

Instead, the PPE is designed to control the SPEs - the PPE loads the SPEs with code, starts them off and can poll them for status and results. The SPEs are not "Turing compliant" - they are not designed to run "stand-alone" programs. They are designed only to run programs under the control of the PPE.

My concern is that if 2000+ people are going to be simulated on it at the end of my project, it's going to crash with just one core. Cause it has to be able to run PHP, Apache, MySQL and serve files like jpg's and doc's without too much lag time (~1sec).

As you have surmised, most likely you are going to run into performance issues. It is a dual-threaded core - like Intel Hyperthreading, it shows up as two processors to the system - but it also has the same limitations.

This is worth mentioning about the PPE (from AnandTech)

The PPE features a 64KB L1 cache and a 512KB L2 cache and features SMT, similar to Intel's Hyper Threading. The PPE features a strictly in-order core, which the desktop x86 market hasn't seen since the death of the original Pentium (the Pentium Pro brought out-of-order execution to the x86 market), so the move for an in-order core is an interesting one. The PPE is also only a 2-issue core, meaning that, at best, it can execute two instructions simultaneously. For comparison, the Athlon 64 is a 3-issue core, so immediately, you get the sense that the PPE is a much simpler core than anything that we have on the desktop. IBM's VMX instruction set (aka Altivec) is also supported by the PPE. Much like the rest of the Cell processor, the PPE is designed to run at very high clock speeds.

The bigger issue is probably the fixed 256 Megs of system RAM. You can add more swap-space, but that's probably not going to help with that many users.

While I was running regular processes the CPU was jumping like crazy. I just installed YDL, so is there anything to streamline processes or boost speed?

Sure - there's things you can do. Turn off unnecessary services, switch to a lighter Window Manager, etc. But - that only goes so far. Probably not enough for what you're planning, I'd hazard a guess.

Cheers,
Paul

[CronoCloud]

The bigger issue is probably the fixed 256 Megs of system RAM. You can add more swap-space, but that's probably not going to help with that many users.

2000 simultaneous? Probably not, but I bet it could handle a few hundred. I think he should try it sometime as "something fun to do" but not as the actual project.

http://linux.about.com/b/2006/01/13/lin ... rmance.htm

Sure - there's things you can do. Turn off unnecessary services, switch to a lighter Window Manager, etc. But - that only goes so far. Probably not enough for what you're planning, I'd hazard a guess.

Cheers,
Paul

Since he'd be running it as a server, he doesn't need X running. Shutting off services will help a bit, yum-updatesd in particular. thought about setting up "junon" (my 3rd PS2, that has a base Linux install on it, it can't read the RTE disc though) as a Nethack server sometime and seeing how many users it could handle.

Ron Rogers Jr. (CronoCloud)