Re: Question about SCO openserver and postgres... - Mailing list pgsql-general

On 23/07/10 05:24, Edmundo Robles L. wrote:
> Hi!
>   I have a problem with the  max  postgres connections  on SCO
> Openserver 5.0.7, so ...my boss decided to buy  the SCO Openserver 6.0
> but this   version comes in 2  editions:  Starter and Enterprise.
>
> If SCO 5.0.7 only allows 95 ( -3  used by superuser)  connections to
> postgres...
>
> Do you know  how many connections to postgres  can i have with
> OpenServer   in Starter Edition or Enterprise edition?

Upgrading from 5.0.5 / 5.0.7 to 6.0 is like upgrading from Windows 95 to
Windows ME in 2010. Or Mac OS 7.1 to Mac OS 9.2. You're upgrading from
the corpse of an operating system to one that's still twitching feebly.
This is not going to be a good way to invest time and money.

Your boss may not realize that SCO basically dropped OpenServer as a
product line in favour of UnixWare in the late 90s. Since then there was
no significant work done on OpenServer. There's been no work done on it
at all (as far as I can tell) since Caldera bought the SCO name and
OpenServer product from the original Santa Cruz Operation, fired all the
software engineers, hired some lawyers and sued world+dog. The Santa
Cruz Operation renamed themselves Tarantella after their primary
profitable product and went on with life, but "SCO" as a company is history.

OpenServer is dead, dead, dead. Any money put into products targeting
openserver is a sunk cost, and you can't change that, but you should
really avoid sinking more money into that mess. If your management is
still sticking to OpenServer, they should probably read about
"escalation of commitment", a decision making tendency that's very
dangerous and very easy to fall into if you don't think about it carefully.

In case you think I'm just a Linux zealot flag-waving, I have a SCO
OpenServer 5.0.5 box in the back room, running business critical
applications. The apps are actually for Microsoft Xenix (yes, 1983
binaries) running in the Xenix persionality on OpenServer. I considered
a port to OpenServer 6.0, but realized it was just slightly delaying the
inevitable move to something modern.

So ... I keep it running - in VMWare, since 5.0.5 runs about ten times
faster as a VMWare guest on a Linux host than it does natively on the
same hardware. It's faster because SCO doesn't use much RAM for disk
cache, doesn't readahead, and is generally just sloooooow in its disk
access and memory use strategies. The Linux guest in a vmware setup can
cache the whole SCO OS and apps disk in RAM, making the whole setup much
faster. It seems more stable under VMWare than running natively on
modern hardware, too.

I'd recommend you do much what I've done. Move your SCO instances to VMs
running under Linux. Provide modern PostgreSQL on the Linux host, and
just compile libpq for the SCO guest. Then start work on migrating your
app to run natively on Linux/BSD/Solaris/whatever.

--
Craig Ringer

Tech-related writing: http://soapyfrogs.blogspot.com/