Date: Fri, 14 Jul 2006 12:05:08 -0500 From: Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com> To: "Tobias P. Santos" <tobias@netconsultoria.com.br> Cc: freebsd-performance@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Upgrade to dual-core (Pentium D) processor - Does it worth it? Message-ID: <44B7CEC4.6050504@centtech.com> In-Reply-To: <44B7CBCC.7020100@netconsultoria.com.br> References: <44B7CBCC.7020100@netconsultoria.com.br>
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On 07/14/06 11:52, Tobias P. Santos wrote: > Hello! > > We have a server running FreeBSD 5.4 i386 (which we plan to upgrade to > 6.1) with a single Pentium 4 2.8GHz processor without SMP kernel. > This machine basically serves web pages that may or may not use MySQL > server (also run in this server). > Usually, we have low usage and load average is ~ 0.2 which is ok, but > sometimes, one single process (e.g., mysqld) begins to use all CPU > cycles, loading up the system and leading the other smaller processes > (in terms of CPU usage) to have a high response time. > As this server's motherboard doesn't support an additional processor, we > are wondering whether a Pentium D processor (830) might help to minimize > this problem. > In our understanding, one core would be busy with mysqld for example, > while the other one would be free to handle other processes like httpd > and serve pages that don't even need mysql resources. > Is this correct? Did someone have similiar (successful or unsuccessful) > experiences? This isn't a clear cut yes/no situation I don't think, but for mysqld, there's a lot of tuning you could probably do to make the cpu time drop and free up more cycles for other processes. There's been discussions in the past on this list about mysql, but if you have already done all the optimizations that you can with mysql (with indexes and such for instance), then the extra processor would definitely allow the other non-database blocked web pages to be served, as long as you aren't actually IO bound somewhere. I don't know how much memory you have in the current machine, but adding more might be a good quick upgrade (that is fairly cheap probably). Eric -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Eric Anderson Sr. Systems Administrator Centaur Technology Anything that works is better than anything that doesn't. ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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