WHICH SERVER IS BETTER?? Check these specs.
 

Hey. Which server is better.. Server A or Server B??
Same price. I use a lot of heavy mysql along with apache and httpd.
The server will be pushed.


Server A:
Dual Xeon 3.0GHz w/HT (2x 1MB L2 Cache)
4GB DDR ECC REG RAM
146GB 15k SCSI HDD1
146GB 15k SCSI HDD1




Server B:
Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz (dual-cores, 4MB Cache)
4GB DDR2 ECC RAM
73GB 10k Raptor SATA HDD1
73GB 10k Raptor SATA HDD2

i would go with server one :)

Yep, server one. Faster HDD helps databases I/O.

My ace programer is prefering Server A.


"Core 2 duo is faster cpu but
15k scsi hdds are excellent, go with first one. Go with A"

Ok.. Sales guy just gave me more info on Server B. He says:

"Also consider with server B It's also able to upgrade to Quad-Cores later, which means you can grow when you need or desire."

yup go with A

mysql rapes hd's the most.

Also if this is for tgp's you should split it up into 3 servers

server 1 for thumbs

server 2 for mysql

server 3 for thumb and trading scripts

bro. you are talking to boneprone here! already do!

I invented that system!

:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup:thumbsup

Server A , much more space

Tomud

Then you should be well versed.

Go with "A." - and do not run MySQL on a server that runs any other processes if you can help it, it's going to be busy enough.

MySQL is still fastest on Linux x86_64, you're unlikely to see all 4GB available without a 64 bit OS. Good luck.

Yeah 64 bit OS will be given.

THe server is used for some cron updates, spidering, croping and search. Along with some smaller graphic hosting.

Ok. Lets say i upgrade server B to a Quad Core. Server A with the faster HD's still better?

No, I say B! The RAM is faster, the CPU is faster.

For what you will be using it for, the 10K RPM Raptors will be fine. It does sound like your apps are CPU and RAM heavy, so definitely go with B.

CPU vs CPU, the Dual Core will kick the Dual Xeon 3.0's ass.

Quadcore vs Dual Xeon 3.0 will rape.

My favorite CPU right now is the Core2Quad Q6600... it absolutely monsters through everything and is actually one of my best sellers. It sells so well that I keep running out of stock damnit!

Definitely get Server B, with Core2Quad Q6600.

Better disks are always better. CPU doesn't matter for static content, and DB doesn't use as much CPU unless your queries (or tables) are really fucking stupid.

You can run kernel-PAE on a 32bit OS and have all 4GB of RAM usable. PAE kernel works well for all the servers that run it here at our DC.

Unless you are doing processor intense work, you are unlikely to run out of processing power before your run out of bandwidth to your disk drives. If you are running things like blogs, TGPs, banner rotators, DB based sites... then you are way more likely to run out of disk access before your run out of CPU.

Super fast SCSI is the way to go, I think.

Sales dude says:

Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz (dual-cores, 4MB Cache)
4GB DDR2 ECC RAM
73GB 10k Raptor SATA HDD1
73GB 10k Raptor SATA HDD2

With ability to upgrade to quad later. Will this upgrade to quad be the quad strenth you are talking about? Is this or will it be a Core2Quad like this?

Which would be a bit more optimal for an overpowered webserver, and not to primarily function as a database.

one HD has mysql the other has httpd images.

It seems the mysql takes up a lot of the servers cpu..

If separated, it'll matter less, but not much so. Optimize your DB calls, and get the SCSI disks. SCSI is always better than IDE/SATA. It offloads it to the SCSI controller.

I'm done now.

Wouldn't know for sure unless he gave you the model number, but since the original is a Core2Duo I'm assuming by Quad he means its direct opposite which would be the Core2Quad Q6600.

Core2Quad Q6600
4 x 2.4Ghz, 8MB Cache


The SCSI will be better than the Raptor, but the B server has way better CPU and RAM. The performance increase you will see with SCSI 15K RPM vs Raptor 10K RPM will be marginalized in my opinion because of the B server's CPU/RAM.

The final outcome though will directly correlate with the amount of read/writes, frequency of each as well as optimization of your DB.
You could very well not see any difference if you dont properly optimize the DB/scripts.

now the better question is, why doesn't the sales guy you are talking to know all this already and offer this information / comparison to you directly?

technically informed sales reps are key to excellent service

heh, if you are really serious about performance, get a solid state hard drive and drop some serious bling.

you could actually do it on a budget depending on how big the database is.... a solid state/flash drive is only a few hundred dollars for several gigs so you can fit most databases on there and that will give you THE BEST performance ever.

You're suggesting a thumb drive, right? Wouldn't that be too slow over USB? Seems like the bottle neck would be the bus at that point.

Edit: Nevermind, you are talking about something over IDE/SATA bus. Duh.

keep it coming.

xeon all the way, especially cuz it's a server's cpu!

At first glance "A" for sure because it has faster SCSI HDs.

However, "B" might work fine for your needs ...

More specifically, what is size, scope, use, etc of the database you plan to put on the server?

A large DB that's mostly read-only that's well structured utilizing optimized queries could likely run on "B" just as well as "A" ...

Ron

the cpu might be good

but is the motherboard and ram good ??
and the rest of the hardware ?

to many of these posters know nothing about the new CPU's. the older Xeons (unless they are the newer Woodcrest or Clovertown dual/quad cores respectively) are all ass compared to the new Core2Duo CPU's.

All older Xeons vs new Core2Duo = core2duo ownage

Save your cash on those drives and get as much ram as you can. If you have many small files and a DB under <5GB, it should blaze even on IDE drives if the filesystem is cached in the RAM. If you have large files, save your cash on the SCSI and buy an Areca sata raid card with 1GB cache and stock those sata in raid0. Make sure you make backups.

Even though Server B is faster... a 10k raptor drive is still a desktop Sata drive and will not have the durability the scsi drives will.

scsi 15k still will do more iops than a 10k raptor drive.

your faster CPU will do you no good if it has to wait on disk IO, most common bottle neck today is due to high loads caused by disk waiting.

Trying to say a core2duo with slower drives will out perform a machine with faster drives on a strict IO based machine is a rather dumb suggestion. Sure you can upgrade the c2d processor in life but it still does you no good if your drives can't keep up. Unless of course you load up your machine with 8gb of ram then life will be fine.

my point was that they are suggesting Server A based on the Xeon CPUs, not because it has 15K RPM SCSIs. this is misleading, especially if he does not need the 15K RPM drives.

sure he will have mysql, but that doesn't automatically mean he needs 15K RPM SCSI's, his other scripts might be more demanding resource wise and he could very well benefit from the faster RAM and faster CPU.

We just don't have the proper specifics to give the correct answer, only speculate on theoreticals.

The answer is pretty simple to solve your IO question/performance.

Simple solution.

Have the provider run download and install the following.
http://members.dslextreme.com/users/...1.0-wht.tar.gz

gunzip -dvc unixbench-4.1.0-wht.tar.gz | tar xvf -
# cd unixbench-4.1.0-wht
# make
# ./Run

post results

it will produce a score based on IO/cpu/etc Good for creating benchmarks/work loads agains various server configurations.

For the comment someone posted about the sales guy. Yes he is giving his opinion of course.. This is it.. Only issue is its different from my programers opinion. My proramer seems to think the HD edge out weighs the cpu and memory. Personally I like the abilty to grow though..

Here's the sales dude:

"I, personally, would go with Core 2 Duo because it has faster CPU,
Memory, and ability to upgrade to Quad-Cores later (like Core 2 Quad Q6600:
4x 2.4GHz, 8MB Cache). The 10k Raptor SATA HDDs are also very fast.
This is also a brand new server with 4x hotswap bays, so you can add more
HDDs later as well. However, it's just my opinion."

ok.. give me a few. ill have it installed now..

Also want me to log in to ssh and post the results from "top"??

On Server A, I'd ask what the SCSI bus speed is, and I'd also ask on Server B if it's SATA 150 Mbps or 300 Mbps.

Take server A' HDD, SCSI rocks and Core 2 Duo from server B and you have one hell of a server :)

Without anyone knowing your actual application load patterns, they are completely guessing.

"MySQL server" can mean many things when you load profile a machine. We have customers that slam CPU, and barely touch disk since tables are loaded into RAM. We have other customers who don't touch CPU, but are maxing out 6 drive RAID10 arrays of 15k SAS.

It all depends on your load patterns. I would say your programmer (hopefully) will have more insight into this than some random hosting company sales rep, or a bunch of people on a message board.

If you want to talk generalities, go with faster disk every time. I would make an educated guess that 95&#37; of our dedicated servers sit at 10% CPU usage or less, while disk subsystems are regularly overwhelmed. CPU simply doesn't matter for *most* hosting applications (there are of course exceptions to every rule).

So, if you trust your programmer go with what he says. If you don't trust him, get a different one :)

Good luck to ya.

-Phil

Ok here are some ssh screen shots..


This is what my server looks like the majority of the time. I call it Idle..

http://www.boneprone4life.com/normal.jpg

and

http://www.boneprone4life.com/normal2.jpg

Thats how it looks most the time.. Granted these were not taken at peak times but this is how it is most the time.



Seprate from this twice a day I have a cron run for about 1 hour each. When that runs it kind of bogs things down. It is an issue yes but my #1 prioroty is idle performance and not so much this. Yes it would be ideal that during this cron the server could handle it well so there are no perfomnace issuse for these several hours per day as the cron runs.. This is what it looks like when this cron runs for those hours:

http://boneprone4life.com/normalcron.jpg

the mysql and other scripts are on a seprate HD than the the lighthttpd image hosting.

Hey phill. As you know I have a box with you as well. It hosts my actual sites. And it runs like a sleeping kitten. Just purrrrrrrrrs and works great..

I also have one with jupiter that hosts another line of sites. It also purrrrrs and is very well balanced..


The server here im talking about is a seprate server i bought to handle a very heavy mysql spider, croping, mysql search heavy and secondary image hosting..

Its been fun trying to figure this one out to get the best out of it.


Its job has been to host these thumbs, http://www.socalmovies.com/moviest/blonde1.shtml
run that search box you see at the bottom of the page which is mysql heavy, and run a 2 hour a day cron that builds the gallereis with php.

Which you can see from the screen shots above does take a load.

Given those top outputs, I'd be inclined to say go with the more powerful CPU.

Output of iostat -x would be useful during busy/non-busy times as well

-Phil

Server 1 alex for 200

Glad to hear things are running good :)

Good luck on this project as well! As mentioned, it looks like your apps are using more CPU than I would generally expect, so the faster CPU might get you further than the faster disk. However, given the amount of system CPU I would definitely get the output of iostat -x and a vmstat for some time during your busy (cronjob) periods.

4GB RAM looks to be just about right, given the amount used for filesystem cache.

I guess it would help if I put what kind of server its on currently to get these resutls!

Its currently on:

IBM xSeries 335

Dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz
4 GB ECC REG Memory
73GB ultra320 15k SCSI HDD1
146GB ultra320 15k SCSI HDD2


So the results you see here are on that of SCSI HD's............

ANother shot of idle.

http://www.boneprone4life.com/normal3.jpg

mysql being from the search being used.. Lighthttpd being the image hosting.

Crons not running at this moment.

Yeah.. I'd go for server A then given those specs. The upgrade to the "oldschool" Xeons at 3Ghz will be a significant CPU upgrade in itself. While the Core2 CPU is somewhat better, it's not going to "blow away" the dual 3Ghz Xeon in real-world performance.

For static image hosting like that, SCSI (or SAS) simply cannot be beat. The differences between SATA are still beyond what I'd expect due to specs - A 10krpm SCSI or SAS drive will simply wipe the floor with a 10krpm SATA drive in the real world.