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From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org>
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Date: Tue, 13 Nov 2001 09:16:41 -0600
To: User Raymond <raymond@one.com.au>
Cc: questions@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: The need for speed
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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.

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