Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 09:16:41 -0600 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> To: User Raymond <raymond@one.com.au> Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The need for speed Message-ID: <15345.14681.462110.586209@guru.mired.org> In-Reply-To: <118554672@toto.iv>
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User Raymond <raymond@one.com.au> types: > We use uni and dual processor PIII systems with FreeBSD and the MUMPS > language (it's an ANSI database language - see http://www.mumps.org/ ). > The language and application tend to be mainly processor bound (due > to the poor coding in the language, mine). I'm looking for more speed > than a dual 1GHZ PIII system for a largish customer - to this end I'm > attempting to boot FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE on an Intel server with > 4 x Pentium xeon 700MHZ processors, each with 1MB cache. > > Wether I boot from floppy or CD, this thing immediately halts > (no twirling batton at all) with "BTX halted" after a lot of numbers. > (I can copy down all the crash screen if this is any use to anyone.) > > So - two questions... > > 1. Have I encountered a known (fixable) problem? Not that I know of. People have been running dual and quad Xeon's for over three years now. Does the machine boot any other operating systems? > 2. What is the best way to go to get more grunt than a dual 1GHZ PIII? Dual Athlons 1700s? The reality is - what's faster depends a lot on what you're doing. If your application doesn't use multiple threads or processes, then adding more CPUs doesn't help very much. If there's a relatively small amount of memory that it spends most of it's time in - like the inner loop of an interpreter - then getting a cpu with enough cache to hold all that can provide a serious boost. To find out what's going to be best for your application requires either instrumenting the application so you know things like this, or benchmarking it on different CPUs. <mike -- Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Q: How do you make the gods laugh? A: Tell them your plans. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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