[Dxspider-support] PC Speed

[Dirk Koopman]

DXSpider is written in perl, which is an interpreted language. It makes
things easy to write, but it ain't 'quick' (at least by my standards).
Fortunately there isn't much that requires it to be that 'quick' so I
haven't resorted to writing bits of C code to speed up the 'slow' bits.
I also have avoiding 'databases' to reduce the configuration required.

There is no question that giving it some decent CPU will make it work
better. Memory, on the other hand, will make little difference once
there is enough. 

Basically a largish DXSpider node's memory usage will max out at around
the 24-26Mb mark (if GB7DJK is anything to go by [14 nodes and
30+users]). Smaller and not so busy nodes will use less. Really big
nodes will use a bit more (but probably not much more than 30Mb).

Because it is all self contained, there isn't much point in giving it
any more RAM. You enough to run the operating system and any other stuff
that you want to on the machine + (say) a 32Mb stick of RAM for DXSpider
and that will be fine.

I have run it quite successfully (in linux) with a small webserver, some
local mail and the node on a 500Mhz celeron with 64Mb of RAM. 32Mb
wasn't quite enough. 

Dirk G1TLH
 
On Mon, 2003-03-31 at 09:25, Darren Collins G0TSM wrote:
> Hi Gang
> I'm currently running Spider in Win98se on a P100 laptop. I'm interested in 
> speeding things up a little and I did try to install Redhat 8.1 on another 
> PC but i got stuffed when trying to load drivers for a network card. 
> However, I wonder how long a 'SH/DX' would take under a Linux OS.
> 
> For my test I entered SH/DX VK0IR
> 
> P100            22 seconds.     Win98se 64Mb
> P200mmx         17 seconds.     Win98se 64Mb
> P200mmx 17 seconds      WinXP Pro 64Mb Boot time 8 minutes! :-)
> PII-200 6 seconds.      Win98se 96Mb
> K6-2/500        3 seconds.      Win98se 256Mb
> K6-2/500        3 seconds.      WinXP Pro 256Mb
> Athlon 1GHz     1 second.       WinXP Pro 640Mb
> Athlon 2GHz     1 second.       WinXP Pro 1Gb
> 
> 
> Also, does anyone have a website where I could possibly download old spot 
> data so I can add missing days to my 2002 folder?,
> 
> regards, Darren G0TSM (GB7EDX)
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> _______________________________________________
> Dxspider-support mailing list
> Dxspider-support at dxcluster.org
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