RE: productionserver

["Gonyou, Austin" <austin@coremetrics.com>]

You could also try dual P4's. The dual P4 Xeon has a non-shared bus. So, you
get like 2.4 Gb/s bandwidth per proc, versus the total 2.4Gb for both on the
P3. Just a though. 

-- 
Austin Gonyou
Systems Architect, CCNA
Coremetrics, Inc.
Phone: 512-796-9023
email: austin@coremetrics.com 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Steve Wolfe [mailto:nw@codon.com]
> Sent: Thursday, August 23, 2001 5:48 PM
> To: Linux XFS Mailing List
> Subject: Re: productionserver
> 
> 
> > We are rather diskbound with our server rather then processor.
> > The new machine will feature a dual 1Ghz PIII with at least 
> 1GB of ram
> and
> > the raid will be a raid 10 totaling 6 disks with 2 raid0 
> sets which are
> > mirrored. The disks will be 73GB 10K RPM disks and each set 
> of 3 will be
> > on it's own channel on the raid controller.
> 
>   You might want to consider the dual Athlons.  My gut 
> feeling is that for
> database work, they will smoke P3's.  In a dual P3, you're 
> sharing a 133
> MHz bus between both processors, giving each CPU an effective 
> 66 MHz bus
> if they're both working at full tilt.  With the Athlons, each 
> CPU has an
> independant 266 MHz bus, and even sharing the bandwidth to the memory,
> they still have an effective 133 MHz each, due to the DDR 
> RAM.  So, for
> working with large tables, where you have to move very large 
> amounts of
> data to/from RAM in a short amount of time, having twice the bandwidth
> will probably make a very large difference.
> 
> > In case you want to order one, it's a Dell PE 2500 with 
> rackmount kit an
> > 6 73GB disks, UPS, and 3 year support. This brings the price in the
> > Netherlands to about 18.000 Euro (divide by 1.1 for US $).
> 
>   I've used Dells before, and while they're decent machines, 
> the machines
> that I build myself are less expensive, just as reliable, and 
> faster.  For
> less money than that, we put together a quad Xeon, with SCA 
> backplanes,
> hardware RAID, the works, and that was over a year ago.  Of course, I
> realize that being in Europe probably increases your cost, 
> and decreases
> your selection.
> 
>  (Incidentally, I'm thinking of testing a dual Athlon to 
> replace the quad
> Xeon.  The MHz rating would be similar (2.4 GHz to 2.8 GHz), but under
> heavy load, each Xeon has the equivalent of a 25 MHz bus, so 
> even when the
> machine is maxed out, the bus seems to be the largest 
> bottleneck.  I don't
> think I've ever seen the CPU's hit more than about 80% utilization,
> they're sitting around waiting for data.
> 
> steve
> 
>