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 ; 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 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 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: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG User Raymond 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. 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