From owner-freebsd-questions Wed Dec 13 15:21:42 2000 From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Wed Dec 13 15:21:40 2000 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id C3BB037B402 for ; Wed, 13 Dec 2000 15:21:35 -0800 (PST) Received: (qmail 8800 invoked by uid 100); 13 Dec 2000 23:21:34 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <14904.1150.593498.981432@guru.mired.org> Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000 17:21:34 -0600 (CST) To: Kent Stewart , jbiquez@icsmx.com Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: advice with old equipment. In-Reply-To: <33093198@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.75 under 21.1 (patch 10) "Capitol Reef" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Kent Stewart types: > Jorge Biquez wrote: > > 1 Pentium PRO DOUBLE Processor 200 Mhz. 256 RAM.2 Disks of 4 GB each one. > > 1 Pentium II 350 Mhz. 128 RAM. 2 Disks of 4 GB each one. > > My question is. What would be your advice on which machine will perform > > better with FreeBSD? and Why? > Well, it depends on the P-II 350. If you have one with PC-100 memory, > it can out perform the dual machine by 50% because of the memory > bandwidth. The rule of 1.8 times the cpu speed for duals would have > the PPro only out performing a P-II 350 with PC-66 memory. If you need > parallel processes, then the dual machine can be faster but I can't > guess when. Unless I've been misinformed, the PIIs internal cache is only half speed, wherease the PPro is full speed. So for memory access that are cache hits, the PPro will give you 200MHz speed, but the PII will only get 175MHz. I've been told by reliable people that the PPro's benchmark at 190% of the speed of PIIs at same clockrate because of this. This implies that the cache hit rate is pretty high for the application in question, though. > I think a lot of people have webservers on older system. I think > either would be adequate unless your have a lot of cgi and then you > never have a fast enough cpu? The older one with 256MB does have an > advantage because when you start swapping. The effective memory speed > drops more than a factor of 2 or so. I usually tell people that it is > 10ns vs 10ms but that isn't always a realworld fact. Yup - disk through put is the crucial issue for a web server that's not building most of it's pages on the fly. In that case, the system clock - not the cpu clock - is what will matter. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Unix/FreeBSD consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message