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Re: CPU Upgrade Advice

From: Chris Goodey <chris_at_quickquote.com>
Date: 1997/01/28
Message-ID: <32ed4c1e.29234439@news.greatbasin.net>#1/1

One cpu running twice as fast will always do better than two half as fast processors because it doesn't have the overhead of scheduling processes. However, in the real world this option is often not available. A 200 Mhz Pentium is not twice as fast as a 100Mhz Pentium because of other factors like memory speed, etc.

Also, you often pay a real premium to get that last little bit of cpu speed. You might be able to buy two processors that run at 75% of the speed of the fastest processor for the same price, and together they would have more total speed for many applications. You also get twice as much on chip cache, etc.

In the case you specified, it might well be that adding more SCSI channels, or faster (fast, wide scsi), or more memory might bring the most bang for the buck. 12 drives on two SCSI controllers sounds like a little much.

I did see our Sun at work that has two processors run a fairly high cpu load on both processors when I ran a single, stand alone query. My guess is that one was doing lots of the I/O while the other processed the SQL query. If several queries are going on then lots of processors should be able to keep pretty busy. With the falling memory prices I would toss in more memory unless you have good reason to beleive you plenty already.

>Larry Monack <lmonack_at_sprynet.com> wrote in article
><01bbe371$0a67b940$a0d4aec7_at_larrym>...
>> Hypothetical question: In a data warehousing environment, is it better
 to
>> have 2 cpus running in parallel or 1 cpu that is twice as fast?
>>
>> I have a 50+GB Oracle data warehouse running on an HP G30 that has 12
 disk
>> drives connected to 2 SCSI controllers. I'm about to do a CPU upgrade
 and
>> would like to get as much bang-for-the-buck as I can. I'm concerned
 mostly
>> about query performance.
>>
>> Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Larry Monack
>> lmonack_at_fsco.com
>> lmonack_at_sprynet.com
>>


Chris A. Goodey             (chris_at_quickquote.com)
Software Engineer           Incline Village, Nevada

Voice 702/831-2404            Fax 702/831-8386
Received on Tue Jan 28 1997 - 00:00:00 CST

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