Minimum system requirements for amd64

Letharion · Veteran Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 1344 Location: Sweden

I'm about to get a VPS, and I was thinking I'd start at the lower end of the scale and work my way upward if things are to slow or I install something demanding.

Will 128mb ram be enough to compile most (server) programs?
I'm gonna get up a lamp stack, run trac/svn/a wiki/drupal and such stuff mainly.

5gb of harddrive space is gonna be a bit low I guess, but a minimal install should be ok, right? I'll upgrade if necessary.

loftwyr · Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 12:22 pm Post subject:

That's a bit low for running a server, especially one with a trac, etc. running on it. I would suggest you go to at least 256 meg to ensure things run smoothly.
_________________
My emerge --info
Have you run revdep-rebuild lately? It's in gentoolkit and it's worth a shot if things don't work well.
Celebrating 5 years of Gentoo-ing.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 12:24 pm Post subject:

Letharion,

Its doable in 5G and 128M but its a bit small.
You will need to flush /usr/portage/distfiles from time to time to keep some free space. With only 128Mb gcc will swap but MAKEOPS="-j1" will help.
My laptop only has 128M and it builds ... somewhat slowly.

If you have a suitable system elsewhere, you can make binary packages for your VPS and either upload them or run a BINHOST.
That way you don't build on the VPS at all.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Letharion · Veteran Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 1344 Location: Sweden

Thanks, I'll probably move up at least one step then. I will get 256 and another 256 in burst.

Running a BINHOST might be interesting, but I'm not sure I have such a system today, will keep in mind for the future

I was given a test-account so I could try it out.
I'm trying to sync, and hit

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 12:59 pm Post subject:

Letharion,

I suspect that you are on a VPS that allows the controlling host to overcommit RAM.
That is, the physical host may have 1G and host 16 VPS with 128Mb each on the basis that it will be very rare that it will run out of RAM.

They may do something similar with hard drive space. This overcommiting of resources allows the host to squeeze more VPS onto the same physical machine (to reduce costs) but I'm sure you can already see the down sides. I'm using 1G and 16 VPS as an illustration only.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Letharion · Veteran Joined: 13 Jun 2005 Posts: 1344 Location: Sweden

I can definitely see the problem with that yes.
Apparently the problem is the number of inodes, I'm limited to 100'000 of them.
I've asked how many inodes I would get with the more expensive package, and have yet to receive an answer.

I realize this question doesn't have an easy answer, but how many will I need?

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 4:36 pm Post subject:

Letharion,

If you can format your own filesystem, you can set the number of inodes, or you can user reiserfs, which does not use inodes at all.
100,000 inodes on a 5G filesystem works out at about 1 inode for 50k of disk space. When you have a lot of small files, as the portage tree does, you run out of inodes before you run of of space. Each file needs at lease one inode.

As your system will not have a GUI, you can use a pruned portage tree to save space and more importanly, inodes.
You can set some extra rsync options so portage excludes parts of the tree that are of no interest to you.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.