In an attempt to fix some service issues that I had been experiencing with Comcast, I contacted them on the phone to swap out my cablemodem with a new DOCSIS v.3 model that I had picked up. The rep on the phone insisted that I was paying too much, and proceeded to make changes to my account to fix how much I was paying. Long story short, my cable bill shot up to over $300/month. This fed me up enough to find a way to finally join a growing number of people and “cut the cord”. My issue was that I wanted to find a way to cut the cord, without losing access to the content that my family enjoys. This is where I turned my attention to the SlingTV.
Hardware
I was in search of a low-cost VoIP provider to use as a home phone replacement, when I thought about Google Voice. The plus side of Google Voice being that all calls are free within the US, making for a fairly cost-effective phone service. The other factor that I needed to account for was that I needed a solution where 911 service functioned correctly. Google Voice alone will not terminate 911 service, so additional service was required.
Having just acquired some new hardware at work, I decided to do some tests to see how well this system would run. Here are the specs of the system running the benchmark:
- Supermicro X7DA3+ MB w/Intel 5000X (GreenCreek) chipset
- (2) Intel Xeon Quad-Core E5450 (3.00GHz/1333FSB/2x6MB) CPU
- 3Ware Escalade 9650SE-16ML PCI-E 256MB w/16 PORTS + BBU
- (8) Kingston 2GB PC2-5300 DDR2-667MHz FB ECC CL5 (16GB)
- (12) Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 1.5Gb/s Hard Drive (RAID 50 array)
To test it out I installed FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE AMD64. Install completed flawlessly, so it was time to do some compiling.
A vanilla make buildworld: 48 minutes
Not bad.. but not amazing either. So I decided to do some threaded compiles to stress the system a little bit. Since it’s an 8 core system, I used the following:
time -h make -j8 buildworld
The resulting time of: 12m 33s was nothing short of impressive.
Following up with a:
time -h make -j8 buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC
Resulted in: 52s
Quite impressive.