Warren Luebkeman wrote: > I asked for a quote on a server yesterday from our hardware provider, and the > sales guy told me about a great new deal. For the same price as a Dual Core, > 2 Ghz Xeon processor, I can get a Quad Core 1.6ghz Xeon processor. My first > impression was four must be better than two, but is it really? > > The server is supposed to be a 50 user Linux terminal server. Our current > specs for this system are: > > Dual Processor Dual Core (4 Processors) > 6 GB Ram > 15K SAS Hard Drives > > So now I can build the same system, but with 8 processors vs. 4, for the same > price. My thought is because its a terminal server, the speed of the > processors is less critical to the number of processors you have, because you > need to distribute the load of 50 users across one server. I can't imagine a > word processor running at 1.6 Ghz vs. 2 Ghz should perform any differently. > So by moving to more processors, I should have less processes running on each > processor, which according to my very rudimentary logic suggests that the > performance should be better, or at least, more efficient. > > What do you think? Aside from the cool factor of having 8 processors, I > would > like to make the RIGHT decision regarding what server I buy. > > I defer to the wisdom of the LUG to show me the way! > > >
I'd definitely say more cores are better. Especially seeing as to how it IS a classroom environment, having 8 processors will not only ensure process balancing, but will also help protect to some degree against someone writing a script to bog down one of the processors. Also, if an application locks up or something else unforseen happens, it's best to have more processors to work with, as chances are such a thing will only tie up a single core. with 50 users, the bottleneck will definitely be on the system bus or the network, probably not the processors. in that kind of setup a huge amount of RAM would also be a good idea. In any case, it sounds like the quad core setup would be a very powerful system and will probably handle your environment quite well. you should get yourself some good management software to make sure everything stays in order! -chris _______________________________________________ gnhlug-discuss mailing list gnhlug-discuss@mail.gnhlug.org http://mail.gnhlug.org/mailman/listinfo/gnhlug-discuss/
