Re: Minimal system (was Re: Basic questions before start)

On 30 Jul 2003, Ron Johnson wrote:

> On Wed, 2003-07-30 at 09:25, scott.marlowe wrote:
> > On Wed, 30 Jul 2003, Gogulus wrote:
> >
> > > As the clients should be able to work without network connection, they
> > > have to have a local database, and if net connection is on, do the
> > > synchronization with master db. The main idea is, sale cannot stop
> > > because of net connection breakage.
> > >
> > > That's why I am asking if 100 Mhz of CPU, 32 Mbytes of RAM can take care
> > > of a database with around 100 tables, 3-4 of these tables having
> > > 50-60000 of records, others have at most 1000.
> >
> > I would say yes, but I would also say that you should design this around a
> > character based interface. The overhead of a GUI is gonna make it much
> > slower.
> >
> > I don't know if you're familiar with the ncurses library, but that's what
> > I'd use, along with C or a lightweight scripting language like Perl or
> > PHP.
>
> Or Python, which has an excellent curses library.
>
> How could he do local and remote access in PHP?

I'm not sure what you mean. Local and remote access of postgresql?
that's easy. But do you mean something else? I'm just talking about
using ncurses from a command line.

http://us2.php.net/manual/en/ref.ncurses.php

If you HAVE to have graphics, you can use gtk too, but that would need
X11.

http://gtk.php.net/

> Wouldn't a local
> Apache server (which takes more RAM) be necessary?

PHP doesn't need apache any more than Python needs Zope. PHP can run from
the command line just like perl, python, etc... We write most of our
system maintenance and cron job stuff in it. :-)

But even if you did run apache, a local server uses about 1M per child
(only need one, two max) and that's more than usual. On a box JUST
running apache/php with both stripped down, you're probably looking at
~650k or so per child.

> Also regarding PHP, "links" is a great text-mode web browser that
> handles style sheets and frames.

I'll have to look it up.