Hi Guest!
Hey - did you know if you click on the title of a thread it will take you to the first unread post since you last visited that thread?
but were afraid to ask: 
STOP!! Never post your email address in open forums. Bots can "harvest" your email! If you must share your email use a Private Message or use the 
smilie in place of the real @
Pretty Please - add it to our Events forum(s) and add to the calendar! >> 
Nunyas
Yoda
Offline
I've reached the limits on my Linux server at home. I'm currently at 8GB of RAM and an Athlon II quad-core processor. The motherboard must be 5 years old at this point. I had to use an "unsupported" BIOS flash to upgrade it to allow use of AM2+ processors (quad-core). The motherboard is one of those MSI units. It's been very reliable and robust for me through the years.
I've been using Ubuntu for ... gosh... 4 years now? (holy cow! that long?!?). My most recent distro upgrade was going from 10.04.x to 12.04.x. I wish I could say it went smooth, but it didn't. It left me with a system that wouldn't mount the / drive. I did manage to get it to finish booting properly and complete its upgrade after a few hours of pulling hair and chicken teeth.
The system is the primary media server on the LAN in this house. It had 9 HDDs in it ("/", "/home", "/var", and 6 drives in a zfs zpool). I've decided to start reducing the number of spindle based drives in it, to reduce idle power consumption and artificially inflated load averages (due to slow disk access times). So, I've started with replacing the / drive. As Greg here mentions, boot up is reduced to a mere fraction of the time that it use to take. Other things I've noticed as being majorly improved, include logging into the box over SSH, logging into a desktop, and cranking up XBMC.
I started with the / drive because it rarely gets written to. It only gets writes when I mess with system configs, and during system updates. I've also put the swap space on this SSD, but set the "swappiness" to use as little swap as possible. This particular SSD is a 64GB Crucial M4 unit. I went with this because it was in my budget and it was replacing an old 128GB HDD that only had 11% disk utilization. So, the SSD is partioned into 8GB for swap, and 56'ish GB for /. In its current state it has ~22% utilization, which, according to my research should be good for SSD longevity/endurance.
Switching over to the SSD for the / mount was an exercise in self hate. In the "old days" it wasn't to difficult to do something like this with LiLo. With multiple versions of GRUB out there and GRUB not necessarily getting upgraded when you do "apt-get dist-upgrade", it became several hours of banging heads on tables and hair pulling to get the system back to "normal". However, now that it's done, I have to admit it was worth it.
I'm going to consolidate my /home and /var mounts into a single 1TB HDD, and slap /var/lib onto another SSD. I want to do this to reduce the number of spindles in the system (reduced idle power usage), and to give MySQL (databases reside in /var/lib/mysql ) a major performance boost. I run a few things that are severely slowed by MySQL being on slow disk media. I know MySQL "gurus" say you should do it in RAM, but this mother board is maxed out on RAM, and I'm not ready to have to buy a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM just to get more RAM. So, getting really fast disk performance from SSDs will be the next best thing. Fast disk performance is important in this situation, because an 8GB RAM limitation and tables that are too large to fit in RAM have to resort to disk. Also, splitting the partitions up like this make it more cost effective. /home is currently 60% of 500GB and /var is 20% of 500GB, but /var/lib is only 16GB. This would allow me to use a more budget friendly 64GB - 128GB SSD for MySQL. For MySQL (my installation is reading and writing millions of records everyday), I believe 128GB SSD is more appropriate for better drive endurance (the bigger the better for write heavy environments).
Anyway, like Doc, I also like Gnome. However, I'm not too fond of Ubuntu's Unity or Gnome 3.x's layout. So, with my upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04.x, I opt'ed to adapt Mint's Cinnamon desktop environment. It uses Gnome 3.0 in the backend, but the Cinnamon interface is more like Gnome 2.x/Windows XP in appearance and use. In a normal use situation, I like it a lot. However, I've noticed that if I let the Gnome screensaver kick in, Cinnamon starts chewing CPU cycles like it's going out of style. So, to prevent that I've started logging out of my box when I'm not actually using its desktop.
I've been using Ubuntu for ... gosh... 4 years now? (holy cow! that long?!?). My most recent distro upgrade was going from 10.04.x to 12.04.x. I wish I could say it went smooth, but it didn't. It left me with a system that wouldn't mount the / drive. I did manage to get it to finish booting properly and complete its upgrade after a few hours of pulling hair and chicken teeth.
The system is the primary media server on the LAN in this house. It had 9 HDDs in it ("/", "/home", "/var", and 6 drives in a zfs zpool). I've decided to start reducing the number of spindle based drives in it, to reduce idle power consumption and artificially inflated load averages (due to slow disk access times). So, I've started with replacing the / drive. As Greg here mentions, boot up is reduced to a mere fraction of the time that it use to take. Other things I've noticed as being majorly improved, include logging into the box over SSH, logging into a desktop, and cranking up XBMC.
I started with the / drive because it rarely gets written to. It only gets writes when I mess with system configs, and during system updates. I've also put the swap space on this SSD, but set the "swappiness" to use as little swap as possible. This particular SSD is a 64GB Crucial M4 unit. I went with this because it was in my budget and it was replacing an old 128GB HDD that only had 11% disk utilization. So, the SSD is partioned into 8GB for swap, and 56'ish GB for /. In its current state it has ~22% utilization, which, according to my research should be good for SSD longevity/endurance.
Switching over to the SSD for the / mount was an exercise in self hate. In the "old days" it wasn't to difficult to do something like this with LiLo. With multiple versions of GRUB out there and GRUB not necessarily getting upgraded when you do "apt-get dist-upgrade", it became several hours of banging heads on tables and hair pulling to get the system back to "normal". However, now that it's done, I have to admit it was worth it.
I'm going to consolidate my /home and /var mounts into a single 1TB HDD, and slap /var/lib onto another SSD. I want to do this to reduce the number of spindles in the system (reduced idle power usage), and to give MySQL (databases reside in /var/lib/mysql ) a major performance boost. I run a few things that are severely slowed by MySQL being on slow disk media. I know MySQL "gurus" say you should do it in RAM, but this mother board is maxed out on RAM, and I'm not ready to have to buy a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM just to get more RAM. So, getting really fast disk performance from SSDs will be the next best thing. Fast disk performance is important in this situation, because an 8GB RAM limitation and tables that are too large to fit in RAM have to resort to disk. Also, splitting the partitions up like this make it more cost effective. /home is currently 60% of 500GB and /var is 20% of 500GB, but /var/lib is only 16GB. This would allow me to use a more budget friendly 64GB - 128GB SSD for MySQL. For MySQL (my installation is reading and writing millions of records everyday), I believe 128GB SSD is more appropriate for better drive endurance (the bigger the better for write heavy environments).
Anyway, like Doc, I also like Gnome. However, I'm not too fond of Ubuntu's Unity or Gnome 3.x's layout. So, with my upgrade to Ubuntu 12.04.x, I opt'ed to adapt Mint's Cinnamon desktop environment. It uses Gnome 3.0 in the backend, but the Cinnamon interface is more like Gnome 2.x/Windows XP in appearance and use. In a normal use situation, I like it a lot. However, I've noticed that if I let the Gnome screensaver kick in, Cinnamon starts chewing CPU cycles like it's going out of style. So, to prevent that I've started logging out of my box when I'm not actually using its desktop.
