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Date:      Thu, 4 Mar 2004 11:39:52 +0000 (GMT)
From:      Francisco <francisco@natserv.net>
To:        "Marc G. Fournier" <scrappy@hub.org>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: AMD vs Intel ...
Message-ID:  <20040304112453.W11547@zoraida.natserv.net>
In-Reply-To: <20040209141200.K13061@ganymede.hub.org>
References:  <20040209121420.G13061@ganymede.hub.org> <20040209141200.K13061@ganymede.hub.org>

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On Mon, 9 Feb 2004, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

> Server environment, Dual Processor ... web/mail/ftp generally ... all our
> current servers are Intel based, but looking at the costs, the AMD are so
> much cheaper, just figured for next one I'd check out what AMD had to
> offer as comparable ...
>
> Just trying to do some comparison shopping ... :)

Marc,

Although nothing I have ever worked with comes even remotely close to what
you are going to torture this new machine with I wanted to throw in my
$0.02.. and mostly subjective testing at that....

I had been using nothing but AMD for a few years. Recently I bought a few
machines from a local vendor and they are an Intel shop. These machines
have faster CPUs that most of my other AMD machines yet felt less
responsive with FreeBSD.

I think that the entire subsystem should be taken into consideration:
chipset, ECC memory, memory speed, disk subsystem, etc..

Just so you get a feeling for what I am talking about... Most of my AMD
machines FreeBSD/Windows were 500Mhz to 1Ghz. The two Intel I bought for 2
clients were 2+Ghz Intel Pentium 4. Although I have not done custom
kernels for those machines I find it interesting that they would "Feel"
slower than machines that are half as fast. I can only guess that
something in the subsystems of these new machines is slower than
in the AMD machines.

Given your environment I think 2+ CPUs with ECC and a good disk subsystem
would be good. Raid 1+0 makes a huge difference in performance (at least
in my testing). Perhaps you could do your DB 1+0 and everything else Raid
5 (which is what I think you have).

Hope things work out with this new machine.. who knows I may end up having
a VM in it someday. :-)



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