From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Nov 13 7:16:46 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-31-203-60.mmcable.com [65.31.203.60]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 1C27737B417 for <questions@freebsd.org>; Tue, 13 Nov 2001 07:16:42 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 9991 invoked by uid 100); 13 Nov 2001 15:16:41 -0000 From: Mike Meyer <mwm@mired.org> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15345.14681.462110.586209@guru.mired.org> 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 In-Reply-To: <118554672@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: <freebsd-questions.FreeBSD.ORG> List-Archive: <http://docs.freebsd.org/mail/> (Web Archive) List-Help: <mailto:majordomo@FreeBSD.ORG?subject=help> (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: <mailto:majordomo@FreeBSD.ORG?subject=subscribe%20freebsd-questions> List-Unsubscribe: <mailto:majordomo@FreeBSD.ORG?subject=unsubscribe%20freebsd-questions> X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG 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