Re: Recommended Wintel Hardware

eb_two_at_yahoo.com (Eric) wrote in message news:<3020b5bd.0306200600.6c0d0dd5_at_posting.google.com>...
> I sincerely appreciate everyone's replies. Sadly (or happily depends
> on how you look at it) I'm not a DBA, but merely a network engineer
> trying to upgrade our 3+ year old servers.
>
> Right now, our 4 processors average around 50% usage over a full
> 24-hours. During peak hours we hover around 75%. And because I'm
> planning on forklifting this old equipment out and replacing with
> completely new gear - I don't even know the full specs of the existing
> gear. I do know this: The filer will be faster, significantly
> faster, due to the old-school fiber channel crap we are using right
> now. Also, the filer will be connected via 2 channeled cu-gig
> connections, and the server will as well.
>
> So, knowing that, I'm eyeballing the Dell PE2650. It has dual
> hyperthreading xeon processors - to win2k it looks like a 4-proc
> system, but I'm not sure how that translates to real-life. But going
> from four P3-700Mhz to two P4-Xeon-2.6Ghz, coupled with PCI-X133,
> 533Mhz FSB, and 200MHz DDR SDRAM, I think this machine will run
> circles around the old beast.
>
> These procs only have 512K of cache, and I'm not truly sure what
> hyperthreading buys me though. Do you think this is a concern?
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Eric Brander

If the *real* quad CPU system is running 75% load, I'd be afraid of a dual CPU (with SMT-enabled) system carrying the load. In *nix land, people would say "what is the run queue averaging on the CPUs?".
So its not in the budget to go for a quad 1.9 GHz PE6650? It sure would give you some headroom.
Is your primary wait event in statspack CPU-related, or I/O related?

(get your dba to install statspack if its not installed - it only takes a couple of minutes - and download and run RDA while you're at it - it saves time if you need to open a TAR - particularly if the server is really hosed - Oracle Metalink account required).

If you're running W2K Advanced Server - it does not know the difference between a logical and a physical CPU. If you have 4 processes active, its not such a big deal, but when you only have say 2 processes active, the scheduler could put both processes on the same physical CPU (one physical, one logical). W2K3 and Linux 2.5 dev know the difference between physical and logical CPUs.

How much memory will be in this beast again? See if you can offload some of the I/O that is going to temp tablespaces by hiking the sort_area_size, hash_area_size.

Paul Received on Fri Jun 20 2003 - 19:14:37 CDT