Developer Forum

Greetings gentlemen,

We are defining the hardware configuration for a new Dell 2950 that
will run IDS 10 to serve a traditional OLTP database of about 10-20 GB
with ~100 -150 concurrent users or so. OS will be RHEL 5,
architecture is Intel-64, 8GB of RAM.

Given the choice between:

1) Two Dual Core Intel?Xeon?5130, 4MB Cache, 2.00GHz, 1333MHZ FSB

2) Two Quad Core Intel?Xeon?E5310, 2x4MB Cache, 1.60GHz, 1066MHz FSB

... what would you choose? Option 2 seems definitely better as it
would make 8 processing cores available to IDS instead of just 4, but
as you can see they woud also run at ~20/30% slower clock and FSB
speeds. Curious about the thoughts of the people in this illustrious
forum :)

thanks all

Danilo.

Greetings gentlemen,

We are defining the hardware configuration for a new Dell 2950 that
will run IDS 10 to serve a traditional OLTP database of about 10-20 GB
with ~100 -150 concurrent users or so. OS will be RHEL 5,
architecture is Intel-64, 8GB of RAM.

Given the choice between:

1) Two Dual Core Intel?Xeon?5130, 4MB Cache, 2.00GHz, 1333MHZ FSB

2) Two Quad Core Intel?Xeon?E5310, 2x4MB Cache, 1.60GHz, 1066MHz FSB

would make 8 processing cores available to IDS instead of just 4, but
as you can see they woud also run at ~20/30% slower clock and FSB
speeds. Curious about the thoughts of the people in this illustrious
forum :)

Well I certainly wouldn't buy a Dell for a start. Do you like speaking to
"support technicains" who can barely speak your language, are reading from a
script, and are courteous and useless in equal, deep measure?

From a technical point of view Option 2 is far superior. Clock speeds are
the great lie of IT performance metrics, right up there with "The cheque is
in the post", "This gives 8 Mbps download speeds" and "I'll tap you on the
side of the head when I'm almost there" in other spheres.

However Option 2 is likely to be double that of Option 1 in licensing cost
terms. If you're in Europe, Middle East or Asia (or even if you aren't I
suppose) mail me on XXXX@XXXXX.COM and I'll explain why, and sell
you the licences cheaply.

cheers
Neil

I expect that both should have enough CPU power for such a fairly
small database and moderate number of users. I suggest to get option
1) and invest the money saved in CPUs and especially in licenses (I
suppose that with 2 x 4 CPU cores you would spend considerably more on
licenses) into better I/O subsystem (more and faster controllers and
disks and better data protection) or protecting budget for DBA's
salaries increase :-)

With these new CPUs you should probably set more than 1 CPUVPs per
physical CPU core to use CPU power effectively.

Personally, I prefer HP/Compaq Proliants when speaking of Intel/AMD
based servers, but that is just personal preference. I also prefer
SLES when choosing Linux platform for Informix, but that's another
personal preference.

Darko Krstic