I'd suggest you not futz with it, and just go to 256 MB. A 64 MB SIMM is
about $120 if you know where to look.
My recommendation is ALWAYS, however, to avoid buying obsolete or soon to
be obsolete systems. I don't buy Pentiums (I buy P-II's). I don't buy
SIMMS unless I have to -- I buy DIMMS. (And if I *have* to buy SIMMS,
they are EDO and at least 32 MB per SIMM -- I've got no use for a 16 MB
chip these days).
If you're going to buy RAM, and it is in the budget, upgrade the WHOLE
MACHINE and just drop the old hard drive into it.... A Pentium-II/233
motherboard and CPU can be had for as little as $480 (and further price
cuts are expected this month!). A P-II board takes DIMMs, so you'd need 4
64MB chips totalling about $500. The rest of your hardware SHOULD remain
compatible... You may need a new CASE for a P-II as the power connectors
are not compatible, either. $50.
So, for barely $1000, your SQL machine can be top notch, doubled in
processing power, doubled in RAM, and easily doubled in performance.
If that's out of the question, then you're right -- the more RAM in NT the
better. Also, with NT, RAID or stripe sets over multiple smaller drives
can up your performance. (You're not using IDE for this mission-critical
machine, are you?). Get LOTS of small, 1 GB SCSI drives, and make them a
single stripe set, or preferrably a RAID-5 set. The more drives in the
set, the more the disk access is "distributed" and the faster any disk
access will be when it DOES need to swap. SCSI hardware RAID volumes are
an ORDER of MAGNITUDE faster than a single IDE drive. Even IDE stripe
sets can help over a single IDE, though you'll want to MIRROR them for
redundancy's sake.
At 08:43 AM 1/21/98 -0600, you wrote:
>Anybody have any suggestions on memory for a computer, other than as
>much as you can get?
>
>We have 8000+ dialups who are smacking the radius server very hard
>(average of 13 Transactions/sec with peaks in the 40's). This is all
>running on a Compaq Proliant 800 with 64 meg of ram in it, has SQL
>server 6.5 service pack 4, ODBCv 3.0, and radiusNT v2.2. Memory is
>running at around 110 meg in use, so obviously we need to go upto at
>least 120meg; what would the suggestion be for 12000+ customers, we are
>having some slow logins right now, and the CPU is up pretty high also
>(I'm assuming most of this is because of swapping memory out to drive),
>I'm assuming more memory would help both of these.