Xeon Quad server system
 

Any of you have experience with such a server? I first wanted to buy a dual Xeon system, but a quad system seems to be more interesting. What is a good quad motherboard, any recommendations? I'm looking for a motherboard for regular Xeon processors, not the Xeon MP ones.

i don't know if i'd build my own quad system like that. might be better to buy a compaq or something that's been tweaked and such and offers full support and warranties. normally i like to build my own stuff.. but you can't beat having the peace of mind that comes from having an SLA :)

why the hell would you need a quad system as a server?
What are you going to do with ? Use it as webserver?
Useless. Unless you run some application that uses a lot CPU
power you don´t need it. CPU is usefull when you do for example
video rendering, compressing/decompressing that kind of stuff

DynaMite :2 cents:

a database would love to sit on a multi-processor system. also.. ever heard of "bragging rights" ? :thumbsup

agreed database are cpu intensive too....the video stuff was an
example.....but again then you would have to take the whole
package.....4 pro´s with IDE disks wouldn´t help for example.

Like I said before it all depends on what you want to do with
the machine....just buying 4 pro´s because it sounds nice
doesn´t make too much sense :winkwink:

DynaMite

I'm going to host my bannerserver, which is conneted to a database, on such a machine. On my network I do right now 10 million banner views per day and have plans to expand my services quickly. Anyhow I watched at the site of Dell and noticed that they are offering some nice quad machines. I will probably start with 2 CPU's and will plug in 2 extra ones when I need to

I got a used compaq quad xeon system with 1 cpu if you feel like building your system from the ground up give me a call i have alot of compaq parts right now. :)

773-895-1605

Most operating systems SMP support leaves a lot to be desired, I recommend running Solaris. Linux/FreeBSD have pretty poor SMP. Windows 2000 Server has pretty decent SMP support, but the rest of the OS sucks.

hmmm ever thought about a filer for that? Netapp or something?
agreed linux/freebsd sucks with anything more than 2 CPU´s
with 2 is not too bad though


DynaMite

DynaSpain.
FreeBSD 4.x has what's known as a "Giant Lock" in kernel operations, meaning that only one kernel operation can happen at any given time, and *nothing* else can happen while that is happening. If you have very computation intensive operations, eg: multithreaded video editing, ok, but anything that is just simple I/O, like web serving, and in many cases database serving, all that is happening is syscall after syscall, with not too much processing, and every syscall is a kernel operation, so the 2nd cpu spends more time "Spinning the lock" than anything else.

Linux is a lot better, but still not "good".

FreeBSD 5.x was supposed to correct all of this, but with all of the core quitting, I doubt that will still happen in any reasonable quality.

hit me up on ICQ 4226143 if u haven;t found a solution yet, we can hook ya up some nice stuff

what do you mean? if you don't mind me asking.

I did not know that issue on FreeBSD thanks for sharing that
info....defenitely something I can take in account sooner or later.

Always good to learn something....thanks man, appreciated :thumbsup

DynaMite

A quad p4 xeon would actually detect as 8 processors :)


I would love to find anything that could use that efficently..

thaz alot of proccessinggg

4 Xeons running at 80% avg a day here..... :thumbsup

Wouldn't Some Single/Dual Cpu systems in a cluster be more cost effcient today?

Not in my situation. I would require a load balancer in that case which would cost a couple of thousand dollars. AND my programmers should do much more work to get all the software running. And programmers are expensive as yyou might now ;(