[Benchmarking] Hardware Specs added to Wiki

[Andrea Aime]

Dimitri Monie ha scritto:
> Andrea,
> 
> I am a bit surprised by the sizing considerations and especially by
> the money issues that are raised. I explain. On one side, each
> participant is spending days of man-power to get ready for the
> benchmark, and they will also pay to be at the FOSS4G benchmarking
> day (travel, accomodation, fees,...). There will also be a marketing
> effort as the market is looking at the event and should not
> mis-interprete the results. On the organizer's side, this benchmark
> gives visibility and the results of the benchmark are expected to
> provide them credibility. The organizers and the participants both
> expect the benchmark results to be as realistic as possible, or at
> least as close as possible to the performance digits that customers
> can produce on their own machines.
> 
> If the organizers cannot afford better than a 4-years old
> workstation-type machine, 2GB ram (it is what I have on my personal
> laptop) and a 160 GB disk (1 TerraByte disk costs less than 100 Euros
> today), I am not sure this benchmark still makes sense, as it does
> not match any realistic environment the usual users are setting up in
> production.

Welcome to the world of open source, where everybody is welcome
to contribute but nobody is forced to.

If you are seeing this benchmarking as something in which one side
provides the infrastructure and setup and whatever else is necessary
and you just run the benchmarks, well, you'll be quite disappointed.

There are 8 teams working on this benchmarking, I expect everybody
to contribute in some way, be it providing data, tools, server
machine administration time and whatnot.
Some do provide hardware, and we have to be grateful they provide
anything at all. The benchmark has been run on a notebook
in the past, because that was all I could afford to bring
to the table (FOSS4G 2008).

So my reaction is, if you don't think the machines Mike generously
offered are not enough, provide better ones, no one is stopping
you. Or see if the participants are up to loan some more powerful
servers for a few months sharing the cost of the loan, or
if you have relationships with hardware providers, see if they
can give us some machines for a few months.

I don't believe the conference organization has put aside any
money for this presentation, and honestly, I would not expect
it to given the nature of the conference.

Cheers
Andrea



-- 
Andrea Aime
OpenGeo - http://opengeo.org
Expert service straight from the developers.