[rt-users] Minimum hardware requirement for installing RT

[Kevin Murphy]

>> I want to install RT 3.0.4 on red hat linux 9, do anyone know what is 
>> the minimum hardware requirement?
>
> most of the grunt work of RT is done by the SQL daemon so as long as 
> the hardware can sustain the number of queries you are fine.

For me, the Perl/Mason code running in the webserver is the bottleneck, 
not the database.  In any case, if you miscalculate and need to scale 
up, you can do so by moving the database server to a separate machine; 
the configuration is no more difficult than when the database runs on 
the same machine.

On my platform (Mac OS X 10.2), the web server (apache 1.3.27 with 
mod_perl 1.28) uses 3 times* as much CPU as the database (postgresql 
7.3.4) -- the difference would probably be even greater for MySQL.  I 
would be interested in knowing other people's ratios.

I use RT3 on a dual CPU 1.2 GHz PowerMac with 1.5 GB RAM (this machine 
is used for other things), and the performance is acceptable but 
slightly disappointing for the 3 people who use it (not very heavily) 
-- even when the server is not doing anything else.   By disappointing 
I mean "sluggish enough that I wonder how well it would perform with 
more users or a bigger database".

Mason, which RT is built on, is cool technology, but some benchmarks 
suggest that it is slow as a dog (think dachshund rather than whippet) 
-- see http://www.chamas.com/bench/.  It also tends to use a large 
amount of memory (which won't matter on modern machines with >128MB 
RAM).

That being said, I don't regret picking RT (about a week into the 
experience).

-Kevin Murphy

*  ps aux time figures for apache and postgres processes launched at 
the same time 3 days ago:
apache: 6.16+13.67+15.37+18.67+11.91+13.37+13.34+14.37+12.08 = 118.94
postgres: 4.73+4.63+3.9+6.85+3.79+3.98+5.41+3.89 = 37.18
ratio of web/db: 118.94/37.18 = 3.2

Hopefully this comparison is valid - call me on this if not.