From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Tue Mar 2 08:21:05 2004 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2AC8716A4CE for ; Tue, 2 Mar 2004 08:21:05 -0800 (PST) Received: from out005.verizon.net (out005pub.verizon.net [206.46.170.143]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id BF81E43D3F for ; Tue, 2 Mar 2004 08:21:04 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from cswiger@mac.com) Received: from mac.com ([68.161.120.219]) by out005.verizon.net (InterMail vM.5.01.06.06 201-253-122-130-106-20030910) with ESMTP id <20040302162104.ZYTQ2677.out005.verizon.net@mac.com>; Tue, 2 Mar 2004 10:21:04 -0600 Message-ID: <4044B466.90409@mac.com> Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 11:20:54 -0500 From: Chuck Swiger Organization: The Courts of Chaos User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.6) Gecko/20040113 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Joseph Koenig References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Authentication-Info: Submitted using SMTP AUTH at out005.verizon.net from [68.161.120.219] at Tue, 2 Mar 2004 10:21:03 -0600 cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: 1 processor vs. 2 X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Tue, 02 Mar 2004 16:21:05 -0000 Joseph Koenig wrote: > I'm putting together a system that will host a relatively small database > (around 20,000 records), as well as run Apache / PHP to search that > database. I have the option in front of me to use a P III dual 1GHz machine > with a SCSI Raid 5, or to use a single P4 2.8 GHz with a SCSI Raid 1. Both > have 1GB RAM. I'm looking to use MySQL as the DB [ ... ] I'd choose the P4 machine, not because of the difference in CPUs as much as because RAID-1 is much better suited for hosting a database than RAID-5. You probably don't need the horsepower of the P4, or even a dual-P3 box unless your workload per transaction is fairly high. 2m hits per month is less than one hit per second; if you have one DB query per pageview, and ~10 hits per page, your average transaction load is going to be quite low. On the other hand, if your usage patterns are bursty, a dual-proc machine helps reduce latency better than a single-proc might... -- -Chuck