August 23, 2002 at 12:07 pm
I need some hardware recommendations for a production server for our SQLServer/ASP-based reporting application that is in development.
The beta development was done on a regular desktop, P4 1.6 GHz, 1GB RAM, running Win2K Server and SQL Server of course. Currently about 10 users, rarely any even concurrent. DB is about 2 GB. Running any queries that take longer than a few seconds peg the CPU.
At first I was just looking at higher-performance desktops like what we have, such as a P4 2.53 GHz. How much improvement would I get using a "real" server, even though they tend to have lower CPU speeds than desktops?
For example, what kind of performance difference can I expect between:
1) Dell desktop - P4 2.53 GHz, 2GB RDRAM, 533 MHz front-side bus, IDE HD, $3600
2) IBM x220 server - dual P3 1.4 GHz, 1GB SDRAM, 133 MHz front-side bus, SCSI RAID HD, $4500
3) IBM x205 server - P4 2.4 GHz, 1GB SDRAM, 533 MHz front-side bus, SCSI RAID HD, $5500
What's the diff between the dual-slower-processor or the single-faster-processor server?
Kinda long, thanks for reading and your advice. Or point me to any benchmarking-type articles you know of.
August 23, 2002 at 12:19 pm
In general and perhaps obviously, the faster your system the better, in any regard you care to measure. The biggest difference between a server and a desktop is reliability/quality. Not to say you cant use a desktop for years as a server. Servers typically have redundant compoents, error prediction/notification, etc.
Before you buy hardware, need to find out why the CPU pegs. Not enough memory forcing OS to use the page file? Badly written query? Bad index plan?
Andy
August 24, 2002 at 6:59 pm
quote:
What's the diff between the dual-slower-processor or the single-faster-processor server?
Concurrent processing. An extremely expense process can be broken across each processor to do twice as much. Also, a processor can only handle so many threads per cycle with the thread marshaller controlling what threads are asleep and running while changing these out at various time divisions but only one thread is being processed at a time the switches just occurr so fast it seems that everything is occurring at once. The speed of a processor does not increase the number of threads that can run since it can really only run a thread at a time (the speed has to do with time across the processor), but 2 processors is a significant increase since two threads run at the same exact time, plus threads can jump between processors as it becomes avaliable actually increasing it's speed to completetion. If this is hard to follow read on, sorry this little window causes me to loose track.
quote:
The real advantage of dual processors comes when you multitask. Windows 2000 (as well as Windows NT 4) automatically uses multiprocessors when multiple applications are running simultaneously—whether or not the programs themselves are multiprocessor aware. - Dual Processors DeliverWhen are two CPUs better?
by Ron LaFon and Art Liddle http://www.cadalyst.com/reviews/hardware/0801wkstn/index.htm
And this is a decent read with benchmarks http://www.ripnet-uk.com/guides/Dual_CPUs.shtml
Edited by - antares686 on 08/24/2002 6:59:29 PM
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