[rt-users] Minimum hardware requirement for installing RT

[Sean Perry]

Kevin Murphy wrote:

>>> 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 went with mysql here because there were already mysql installs when I 
started (don't change things as a new hire).

I see about equivalent hardware use between apache and mysql.  If 
anything the apache + perl uses more memory.

Perhaps the perl on OS X is not particularly optimized?

> 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).
> 

with close to 200 tickets and 20 some users I am not too upset with the 
performance.  But it would be nice if something other than Mason had 
been picked.  A bit late now though.

When we have 1,000 tickets will see how things shape up.