phasing out Solaris/Oracle/Netscape with Linux/PostgreSQL/Apa che

[kragen at pobox.com]

Mark Hahn <hahn at coffee.psychology.mcmaster.ca> writes:
> [someone writes]
> > [someone writes]
> > > do I absolutely, positively need SCSI? I was thinking about putting a
> > > second 100 EIDE host adapter in, and run disk striping plus mirroring
> > > over 4 EIDE hard drives (the better models from IBM). 
> > 
> > SCSI is GREAT, and you should set up redundant hot swaps so if you crash,
> > you insert a new disk, type "boot", and you're back online with a node.  I
> 
> uh, that misses the whole point of raid, which is to survive hard disk
> failures.  "survive" as in "not crash, keep functioning".  raid1 or 5
> built on IDE disks do this *just*fine*.

You should probably explain about hot-swapping off-the-shelf IDE
disks.  I've heard it's not a problem at all under Linux if the disks
are not presently being accessed, but I don't have the personal
experience to corroborate this.

> > You'll take a big performace hit running perl too much - it's interpreted.
> 
> nonsense.  perl is compiled, and also not a major performance hit.

Perl is not usually native-code compiled, and the native-code
compilers for it are not so great (they generate inefficient C, which
is then compiled with a C compiler).  I've done image-processing stuff
in Perl (without PDL!) and I can attest that it's pretty slow.

PDL might be HPC-worthy.  I can't tell.