On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 01:39:51AM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I am pricing out two servers right now. > > One server will be an Apache/PHP web server. The other will be a > MySQL database server. > > I plan to install OpenBSD 3.9-stable and PHP and MySQL packages. > > These server will be Dell PowerEdge 1950. > > Each will have a Dual Core Xeon 5060 (3.20Ghz with 1066Mhz FSB). > > Knowing the setups I'm gonna be using (the one's mentioned above), > and I gonna get much performance increase by adding a second > processor (the same type of course) to these server? > > Is OpenBSD and Apache/PHP gonna take advantage of a second processor > and show some decent increase in performance or am I throwing money > away on the second processor?
A second processor might be a good investment here. Of course, two servers is also worth considering, as such a setup is likely to be, at least, more robust in the face of hardware failures. (It's also more complex...) > Same for OpenBSD and MySQL. Am I gonna be throwing money away by > purchasing a second processor for it? Possibly, yes. MySQL is threaded, and the OpenBSD threads implementation isn't the fastest possible (it's all in userland, so there's only one kernel-level process/thread). If using a better database (PostgreSQL comes to mind) is not an option, you might want to consider using another system - like FreeBSD - for this; MySQL performance isn't terribly good, even on a uniprocessor system, anyway. This does, of course, not mean that it is unusable by any means; many people run MySQL on OpenBSD and are quite happy with performance, stability, and so on. Me, I dislike MySQL for other reasons. > Lastly, default server will be coming with 1 GB of RAM. I plan to > upgrade both servers to 4 GB of RAM each? Is this worth spending the > money or am I wasting it here as well? Note you'll need a recent version to use > 2 GB RAM on i386. > I don't mind spending the money on extra RAM and processors if the > server setups I'm planning on using will take advantage of it. I'm > too new to OpenBSD to know if I would wise in the extra spending or not. Joachim