Was [Gllug] Best option for a lot of compute power

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 10:47:20AM +0100, Luke Hopkins wrote:
> Have been following this thread with interest. We run web services which
> are very db & disk intensive.

Opterons are definitely good for memory intensive operations.
For DB/disk instensive app you might be better off spending
more on a high performance disk subsystem instead, although its 
really pretty hard to say one way or the other without testing the
apps in question. Profiling the app on your existing hardware 
with a tool such as OProfile would be a good start to try and
identitfy existing bottlenecks which would need addressing.

> We had planned on ordering some Dell 1750's (XEON with HT), but the
> concensus seems to be that's not the best option?

As above you can't really make black+white decision without
some emprical evidence to identiy weaknesses in current
hardware.

> Would opterons be better for this purpose? Would we then need to run a
> 64 bit OS? Reccomendations?

You'd definitely want a 64bit OS to take full advantage of the
64bit features of the processor. For example, you'll elminate
the need for the nasty highmem mapping hacks in the kernel which
plague 32bit processors when accessing > 1 GB RAM. My (obviously
biased :-) recommendation would be RHEL 3 has support for the Opteron
as well as the newer Intel chips with the same 64bit instruction set.

Dan.
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