[Benchmarking] Hardware Specs added to Wiki

[Jeff McKenna]

Dimitri,

I think this is good feedback, thanks for bring this forward.  I know 
Mike and Joel at the U.S Army Corps are working hard to find machines 
that meet everyone's needs.

Please continue to be very vocal about your team's needs and we'll do 
our best to accommodate.

-jeff



Dimitri Monie wrote:
> 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.
> 
> I am not complaining on the machine, I am confident that our software will perform properly and with acceptable performance on it. My issue is on the relevance of the platforms and on the usability of the test results to the customers expectations.
> 
> A server-type machine (4-core) with 8 GB RAM and 1 TB of hard disk looks more suitable to me.
> 
> Dimitri Monie
>