Re: Which SMP CPU for FreeBSD 6.2?

On Wednesday 18 July 2007 06:05:00 Jack Toering wrote:
You probably don't need to follow every move, but it might make sense to
do

some actual research if performance matters to you? You don't even say
what your performance critical server is going to be doing ;)<

At the moment I'm not too sure either. :) The reason I say this is we have
a 246 Dual Opteron that is handling 15,000 unique visitors an hour pulling
data from around the world, generating weather maps, and pounding MySQL.
It has no problems. There is host a large hotel site on the same server
that is doing 900 and hour. 2/3 of the bandwidth is inbound to make the
calculations. It took us a lot off tweaking to get it where it is today.

but K8's are still pretty good with many workloads thanks to their far

superior interconnects.<

Which is why we went with dual 246s at the time. The second processor on
the Intel was a waste of money and it dual chip at the server level
couldn't hold a candle to their laptop chips and the cost more than AMD.
That decision was a no-brainer.

Most numbers I've seen have been more based on games and media encoding in

single socket configurations, and in 32bit mode at that;<

Yes, I'm quite skeptical about benchmarks even on web servers having
learned the hard way. We tried 3 big names on Linux where the site fell
down before 9AM. A 4th, Rackspace, the salesman didn't return my calls
after they had an engineer check out what we were doing. Before and after
we tried 3 versions off Linux ourselves with lots of configurations. Based
on all of the benchmarks, FreeBSD didn't make sense which is why it took us
so long to get here. Our competitors are running 5 box server farms to do
what we accomplish with this setup and we have better response times. We
are running SCSI raid. There is no measurable user response difference
between a load of 17 or .7. Due to optimizations, our current load doesn't
exceed 6 or 7 with normal being more around 2.

Then the NOCs hated us because we used the bandwidth they promised and we
were told to move along one way or another 3 times. The best NOC we've
ever had is SAVVIS, Texas. They could not handle it either where the
server was at first, but after I proved to them with a packet sniffer that
there was a problem, they worked hard for us to get us a place in the DC
that could handle it. We've lived happily ever after there. That's where
the next one is going also. We've had all we can handle of being a
fugitive and a vagabond.

Naturally, my thoughts are drifting toward, "Hey, the new site should be
doing the 246s and the old site something new." In the mean time I've kept
up off and on, on the issues with AMD code not being nearly as efficient as
the Intel code due to optimization for the Intel due to its far greater
numbers. Next, the abosolute 180 degree change in the market between now
and then concerning AMD and Intel. I've read the Tom's hardware and
AnandTech (I think) comparisions. However, a lot of beautify theories get
beat up by ugly realities and I have the scars to prove it. That's why I'm
here fishing. I'm not expecting to find someone else with traffic and
loads like this, but any insights are welcome when it comes to rolling the
dice again because anything you can do to cut down the number of tries you
need to throw the dice is a huge help.


Another site you can look at for reviews which is far less game/windows/office
oriented is tweakers.net,

http://tweakers.net/reviews/661/7 for a good test of a woodcrest based server.


Thanks!

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