Re: To upgrade or not to upgrade?


Subject: Re: To upgrade or not to upgrade?
From: Paul J. Lucas (pauljlucas@mac.com)
Date: Sun Jul 08 2001 - 01:12:13 MDT


On Sun, 8 Jul 2001, Matthew 'Fringe' Duhan wrote:

> I have an old PowerMac 6100/66, 80 Mb RAM, 4.1 Gb HD running YDL 1.2.1 as my
> web/e-mail server.

        I have an old 6500/300, 64 MB RAM, 4 GB running YDL 1.x as my
        mail and web server.

> It's not terribly fast, but it does the job, and is fine for my purposes. I
> don't run Xwindows or a GUI on it, it's all done from the command line, and
> is running well.

        Ditto.

> Is it worth it for me to upgrade?

        IMHO, no.

> I could just upgrade apache, php, etc to the latest versions

        That's what I do: just upgrade software on a case-by-case
        basis.

> Or, I could tarball, upgrade to YDL 2.0, reconfigure everything, etc.

        This is a pain. Unless there in something specific that you
        NEED from the new release, I don't see a point.

> My thinking on this is if it ain't broke, don't fix it

        Right!

> However, if 2.0 is going to give me great improvements over 1.2.1, I'd rather
> get the better performance, stability, etc.

        Do you *know* that you will get better anything? The only way
        you wold get better performance if a later kernel would give
        that to you. But, you can upgrade just the kernel without
        upgrading everything else and without having to wipe the disk.

> Do the advantages outweigh the disadvantages of downtime that I should
> upgrade, or am I fine where I am? I'm interested to hear opinions, but facts
> are better (such as "2.0 will give you an x% speed boost over 1.2.1").

        Repeat 10 times: it's the *kernel* that matters for
        performance, not the YDL distribution. A distribution is
        nothing more that a collection of parts that pretty much can be
        upgraded individually.

        - Paul



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