Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:12:15 -0500 From: "Jim Stapleton" <stapleton.41@gmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org, darryl@osborne-ind.com Subject: CPu Questions Message-ID: <80f4f2b20801170712g67cb5028wfda685ab118acb78@mail.gmail.com>
next in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> In a smaller environment (50 users) will processor selection make > any real difference ? Website with some simple php scripting and > mysql databases tied in . This is a very tough question to answer. If you already have a test environment, see how it works on your current hardware, and ascertain the locations of the bottlenecks. All of the following are possible in your situation: -> Network: What is your server using? What is the average connection speed for the users. All the CPU speed in the world won't help you if you are attempting to pump out 50 100k pages a second on a 56k line. -> Disk: How much information are you pulling off of the disk? If you are doing complex queries on a 1GByte table, and server multi-megabyte files, and using an ATA66 drive without a RAID setup, that disk is probably going to be a slowdown for your system, and running 4x Quad Core Xeons (core-based, not netburst) overclocked to 5Ghz won't be noticably faster than a single Pentium 4 and 2.8Ghz. (OK, that might be a slight exaggeration). Memory is helpful in this case. Memory can help here too. -> CPU: How much is there in the way of calculations? Are the queries simple or complex? Are there a lot of loops (even a "simple" program with a lot of loops or recursion can be very CPU intensive)? If it is just serving up pages with fairly simple [insert web language of choice] code and SQL queries, the old K6-III 450Mhz I have for my home server is more than sufficient for a fairly large number of users. For simple timestamps and stylsheet spitting Scripting/SQL, that machine should be able to handle 50 users at a time without a problem. So, in the end, we can't answer your question without more information, but hopefully this will help you answer it. How fast will the machine need to pull data off the disk? How fast will it need to write the data? How much of the data can reside in memory (if it'll all fit in memory, then disk IO isn't nearly as big of a deal?), and how calculation intensive is your code? Does that help answer your question? -Jim Stapleton
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?80f4f2b20801170712g67cb5028wfda685ab118acb78>