Which SMP CPU for FreeBSD 6.2?

[Jack Toering]

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

I found the one review in English.  While the site is named tweakers.net, an
English word, but most of the reviews and text seem to be in Friesian,
Dutch, Flemish, or German or some dialect from the northern European
mainland.  I don't see a way to view the remainder of the content on the
site in English unless I'm missing something.

Thanks!

-----Original Message-----
From: Darcy Buskermolen [mailto:darcy at ok-connect.com] 
Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2007 4:45 PM
To: freebsd-performance at freebsd.org
Cc: Jack Toering
Subject: 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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