Re: Changing processor architecture?

Jeff wrote: > We are currently running on Solaris 9 with dual 400MHz UltraSparc II > processors with 1GB of RAM. We are looking into purchasing new servers, > probably Linux on a single Xeon or Opteron (maybe dual core). But I'm > not sure how to compare speeds between the two architectures so I'm not > sure what my target should be for price vs. speed with new systems. > We're a small company on a tight budget. > > What are your experiences with switching platforms? The main question is whether you are better off with one processor that 3-5 times faster or with the two you have already. If your processing includes many stored procedures, functions are used in queries, and much ORDER BY and GROUP BY processing then a faster processor will buy you more than multiple processors. On the other hand if the queries are complex and/or access fragmented tables using PDQPRIORITY>1 then multiple processors (or mulitple cores anyway) are an advantage. Are your current CPUS maxed out? If they are not you may not see any difference in total throughput though individual processes may complete more quickly. Will you be upgrading your disk farm at the same time to something significantly faster than what you have? If you are bottlenecked on IO then without a disk upgrade you'll not be able to take full advantage of the faster processors. So though the dual core Opteron is almost 5x faster than the two UltraSparc IIs your apps may only run a few percentage points faster because they'll now be IO bound. System performance is a package deal, unfortunately. You have to take the whole package into consideration. Art S. Kagel > Thanks, > > -- > Jeff > jlar310 at yahoo