[RFC] Use donations for more memory for svn/cvs/mail server

[Derek Atkins]

Even though I "control" the donation account, I felt it only
appropriate to obtain approval from the developer community
before using it for anything.  My "request" is to purchase
more memory for the server.

Currently the server has 512MB of DDR333 SDRAM.  Right now it's using
all that RAM and sitting in swap:

[root at cvs httpd]# free
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        513096     505968       7128          0      72704     204336
-/+ buffers/cache:     228928     284168
Swap:      1046192     270748     775444

I think this is mostly due to the change to svn.  The apache
servers are sitting with 20-40M virtual size each (10-20MB
resident), and the mailman runner is sitting at 100MB VSS.
I honestly don't think we're running anything extraordinary,
and the server load is pretty low, so perhaps I'm just being
alarmist about using up 25% of our swap space.  But that's
why I'm sending out this RFC -- to get your opinions.

The server has an open memory slot.  According to crucial.com,
our system can hold up to 2GB of RAM and has two banks
of one slot:

  http://www.crucial.com/store/listparts.asp?Mfr%2BProductline=Dell%2BDimension+%2F+Dimension+XPS&mfr=Dell&tabid=AM&model=Dimension+2400+Series&submit=Go

I see two choices (well, three):

0: Do nothing.  (this was my "well, third" choice)
1: Pay $64 for 512MB to bring total memory to 1GB
2: Pay $151 for 1GB to bring total memory to 1.5GB
   (note that prices above do not include taxes and shipping)

I'd like to hear from you developers about what you think.
I'll note that we have plenty of cash in the donation jar
to pay for either option.

I'm not in any hurry to make this purchase..  Indeed I don't plan
to do anything about this until January (I was going to order
the RAM at the end of this month).

Please let me know what you think.  (Feel free to respond personally
and I can summerize if you don't want to respond to the list).

Thanks,

-derek
-- 
       Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available