Hyper.nl Unreal Services

Hyper · Posted: Sun Nov 25, 2007 1:27 am Post subject: [2008/xx/xx] Project 64

Project 64
November 25, 2007

While planning a serious upgrade of my workstation's hardware I came across an issue I underestimated until now. 32 bit. 4 GB of memory. What once was an unbelievable headroom for the foreseeable future is now beginning to become a serious limitation. I've been studying the possibilities and boundaries of the Win32 operating systems and what I found surprised me. Some details:

Windows NT 32 can address up to 4 GB of (virtual) memory space.
By default, half of the virtual space (2 GB) is dedicated to programs and the other half to the Windows kernel itself.
Other hardware memory like the PCI memory space and graphics RAM are also addressed in the same 4 gigabytes. This means that when a 32-bit system has 4 GB (or more) RAM, it cannot all be used because PCI and graphics memory are removed from the usable memory space.
A high-end system with 4 GB RAM and a 768 MB graphics card will only have around 3.2 GB of usable RAM. More cannot be addressed.
The 2 GB of application memory space is being heavily used by 4 Unreal servers, a master server, two proxy servers, a web server and several security programs.

The solution to these limitations is already here in the form of 64-bit computing. 64-bit (x86-64) systems support up to 128 Gbytes of memory and 16 Tbytes of virtual memory. Current 32-bit applications (like Unreal) are still supported in 64-bit OSes and get their own private 4 GB of virtual space. This may be the solution to many of the "out of virtual memory" crashes that occur at my server currently. But to be sure of this theory, I will need to test it.

The big hardware swapping
I won't buy 2 new systems, instead I'll start a big swap of parts. Here is the plan:

My workstation will get a core upgrade with an Intel Penryn quadcore processor, 4 GB of DDR2 memory and a RAID 5 SATA disk array.
The core system of my current workstation (An AMD Athlon 64 dualcore with 2 GB of DDR memory and a RAID0 array will be moved to the server. The 2 GB ram of my current workstation will be combined with the with the 2 GB RAM that my server currently has to form a whopping 4 GB. The RAID 0 array will be reconfigured as RAID 1 for added data protection.
As long as the building takes place, I'll keep the current server available as backup. When there are problems I can just switch back the memory and bring the old system back online.

Of course the upgraded workstation as well as the server will run a 64-bit OS.

When will the conversion start?
I will wait for Intel to release the new Penryn processors somewhere in January 2008. Around that time I'll start building the new workstation and when the workstation is done I'll move to the server. I'm already doing some early 64-bit compatibility tests and I'm currently in the process of solving compatibility issues with old 32-bit programs.

Note
I'm also busy with some real-life projects so times may be subject to changes. During the rebuilding there will be some additional downtime and restarts for testing and updates.
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Hyper · Posted: Wed Dec 26, 2007 11:26 pm Post subject:

I'm right now testing mod_bw for Apache as replacement for a Windows 2000 kernel driver based bandwidth controller. The reason for the testing is that when I move to Windows XP 64 I can no longer use the Win2000 kernel driver.

Update: mod_bw is now in use!
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Alter your reality...forever.
Hyper.nl Unreal Services
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Hyper · Posted: Sun Mar 02, 2008 5:37 pm Post subject:

I'm currently intalling the new server. I'll soon change the IP of the new server to the old one to make the transition working. This will cause some downtime. Expect some disruptions of the servers in the days to come.

I'll keep the drives of the 'old' server untouched in case I need to revert.
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Hyper.nl Unreal Services
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Hyper · Posted: Mon Mar 03, 2008 2:21 am Post subject:

The server is now online. I still need to upgrade the graphics card (the good old S3 Trio64V+ is no longer supported under 64bit)

Edit: Graphics card upgraded as well. (Simple PCI-express card for server)
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Hyper · Posted: Mon Apr 07, 2008 9:40 pm Post subject:

The last hardware (memory upgrade) has been installed. This project is now finished :-)

Both server and client are running at Win64 now.
Both server and client are running with 4 GB of RAM.
Both server and client are protected with redundant drives (RAID).
The dual core processor should give more processing power while running multiple servers and services.
_________________
Alter your reality...forever.
Hyper.nl Unreal Services
unreal://hypercoop.tk