RE: Number of CPUs vs. Speed of CPUs

Bruce:

You got the point. We have discussed that some time back (Steve, Jonathan, and Adrian Cockcroft) and the result was:

Few Faster CPUs are better for Performance, More slower CPUs are better for Manageability and fault tolerance.
Steve Adams and Adrian are with few faster CPUS and Jonathan supports more slower CPUs.

Best Regards,
K Gopalakrishnan
Bangalore, INDIA

-----Original Message-----
Bruce (CALBBAY)
Sent: Thursday, April 18, 2002 4:33 PM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

Lisa,

These aren't my points or ideas but below are some emails from Steve Adams that I have kept that may be of use.

Also, I don't know for sure, but the 2 books (and or their authors:-) " Practical Oracle8i by Jonathan Lewis" and "Scaling Oracle8i by James Morle" may well have some very useful information on this topic.

HTH,
Bruce Reardon

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Thursday, 1 March 2001 17:46
To: Ixora Answers

Hi All,

Here is another follow-up to the February "Ixora News" item "Buying Time" at http://www.ixora.com.au/newsletter/2001_02.htm#memory_access. One of our subscribers asked Adrian Cockcroft, the author of "Sun Performance
and Tuning" at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0130952494/ixora for a second opinion.
Here is Adrian's response ...

        Few faster CPUs is a little more efficient and has lower response time.

	More slow CPUs gives a flatter more predictable response time curve
	as the load increases so you can run nearer 100% busy.

	Read any book on queuing theory, especially Neil Gunther's
	"Practical Performance Analyst" at
	http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/059512674X/ixora.

See "Performance Dynamics" at http://www.perfdynamics.com/ for more on Neil Gunther's work, and "Performance School" at http://www.perfskool.com/ for related downloads.

@ Regards,
@ Steve Adams

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Wednesday, 28 February 2001 15:23
To: Ixora Answers

Hi All,

The recent Ixora News item "Buying Time" at http://www.ixora.com.au/newsletter/2001_02.htm#memory_access has provoked some
discussion on the question of whether to buy fewer faster CPUs or more slower
ones.

It has been pointed out that there is one case in which it might be better to
buy more slower CPUs. If an application has a number of highly CPU intensive processes (or threads) greater than or equal to the number of CPUs available,
then the CPU usage will be unacceptably high. High CPU usage increases context
switching overheads and introduces a risk of latch contention. If for some reason the CPU intensive processes cannot be tamed, then buying a greater number
of slower CPUs may give better overall performance, despite the reduced CPU capacity and scalability.

@ Regards,
@ Steve Adams

-----Original Message-----
Sent: Friday, 19 April 2002 1:58

We are in the process of sizing a new server for multiple Oracle instances. What factors are useful as input in determining how many CPUs and the relative speed of them? For example, do we want fewer, faster CPUs or do we want more, slower CPUs? Are there any good guidelines to determine what the number of CPUs should be?

Thanks in advance -
Lisa

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Author: Reardon, Bruce (CALBBAY)
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