[Dxspider-support] problems when moving to dxspider

[Dirk Koopman]

On Wed, 2001-10-31 at 12:15, g3orh wrote:
> problems when moving to dxspiderPhilip,
> 
>             I will only partly answer one of your questions and that is about the P166. I am currently experimenting with an old P166 with only 16 MB of ram
> and a Cyrix processor. I have been able to run the full ax25/netrom setup plus DXSpider 1.46 / 1.47 / 1.48 and also 1.49 (in turn of course) but this has not been used in anger (live) under any conditions (or adverse cndx) (Yet !). I hope to do so shortly. The main Linux/spider computer is a PII / 400 Mb with 256mb Ram. (Don't miss the point that Curses has to be upgraded to 1.06 for 1.49.)
> 

Although it will run in 16Mb, any kind of 'real' usage will cause the
machine to swap. The cluster.pl process can grow to 20Mb or so over a
long period so I would strongly suggest that you need at least 32Mb. If
you have many ax25 connections then you might need more. 64Mb should be
fine.

Be warned that if you run anything else on the machine (eg FBB,
converse, ircd etc) then you will need more than 32Mb.

The actual speed of the processor is probably less important than the
speed of the discs which, if you have a lot of spot data, can take a
fair time to plough through when doing esoteric sh/dx's.

Having said that, perl is an interpreted language and there is no
question that having a faster processor helps. I am gradually optimising
some of the slower activities as I encounter them as well.

Having said that on GB7DJK (500Mhz Celeron) this last weekend I coped
perfectly adequately with > 800 spots/hour to between 20 and 30 users
and 9 nodes (on a 64Kb link) with no noticable delay and no significant
increase in ping times to my neighbour nodes. 

Dirk G1TLH