On Aug 27, 2006, at 9:33 AM, Joachim Schipper wrote:
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).
I picked up a little bit about this single kernel-level thread and
multiple userland threads but I don't quite understand it. Are there
any good articles or documentation somewhere that better explains this?
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.
The thought of using something other than MySQL has crossed my mind.
But I'm trying not to stray to far from what I already know. I
usually farm out the server maintenance to another company but I
decided to do it myself on this project. So I've chosen OpenBSD as
the platform to go with. Changing to PostgreSQL or any other database
would add to much extra time to the project and would probably cause
me to miss my deadlines. MySQL has been very good to me in the past,
but I never had to worry about the OS underneath it till now.
I guess if I have performance issues, I can investigate FreeBSD as
the OS under the database server. I was just hoping to use OpenBSD
due to it's extremely high focus on security.
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
