[Blue39390]

i am looking into getting a g4 powermac to replace my HP from my priamry server. I have found a couple of 500MHz G4 on ebay for around the 100 price point. my question is will 10.4 server run smoothily on a machine w/ a 400-500MHz processor and 512 ram?

thanks
JB

[imitchellg5]

Not smoothly, but it will run. Panther Server would be better. You need at least a gig of RAM to run any version of Tiger on any machine in my opinion.

[bballe336]

It will run absolutely fine. I'm on a 450mhz G4 with 576mb ram and it runs 10.4 well, server should run well too.

[newtech]

If you spend $499+ to buy a license to run OS X server, it would make sense to spend more than $100 to get a faster piece of hardware to run it at a respectable speed.

[dn15]

Originally Posted by newtech 

If you spend $499+ to buy a license to run OS X server, it would make sense to spend more than $100 to get a faster piece of hardware to run it at a respectable speed.

I second this comment. Sure, it'll run alright under a relatively light workload. But if you're going all-out by getting Mac OS X Server you may as well spend a few dollars extra and get something newer. Also, a newer machine would be less likely to die unexpectedly as older computers sometimes do if running 24/7. Unless this is for something very casual like a home media server, it can be a big pain to have to take down a server because it's broken or you outgrew it too quickly. If you're going to rely on it for anything important or business-related, get something that's physically going to last longer than a tower that's already 5+ years old.

Even an Intel Mac mini (or recent iMac) with 2GB RAM could still cost less than $1,000, and either one would be lightyears faster for everything except maybe hard disk access and hopefully will last much, much longer without needing repair.

As a general rule (which I just made up right now) if you're putting together a server that's even remotely important, you should not use hardware that cost less than the software you're going to put on it.

[Waragainstsleep]

It really depends what you intend to serve with it. If you are just serving media or files using AFP or iTunes or something, then an old PowerMac will do great. I would plump for a dual given the choice, but other than that, Tiger Server runs happily enough on a Smurf G3, and you don't need shedloads of RAM to serve files or email. Maybe if you are streaming video or hosting a well used website, or need to serve files to more than two or three machines at once you might think about something flashier. If this is a media server or similar, then your investment should be in storage. You can quite cheaply and easily build a decent RAID using PCI drive controllers, and there is room for four HDs on top of the boot drive without any modifications required (extra cooling might be an idea though).

Alot of the RAM hungry eye-candy is less used in server, so in many cases less RAM is required than in clients. The original Xserve shipped with 256MB! And while Jaguar server didn't as much as Panther or Tiger, I'd bet you won't see a massive performance boost in most tasks if you go over 512MB.

[angelmb]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

Alot of the RAM hungry eye-candy is less used in server, so in many cases less RAM is required than in clients.

Could you give more info about it?, that seems interesting enough.