First off, thanks so far for the valuable input. I have a few tables that are relatively large (approx. 18 mil records and 8GB of data in one) and growing so I will be looking more toward higher end hardware. However without infintely deep pockets, I'm wondering where the best place is to focus resources. For example, which would hypothetically perform better with all else being equal:
- quad-procs with 4GB RAM or dual-procs with 8GB RAM? - Solaris, RH Linux, SuSe Linux, other OS? Particular versions of these OSs? - Sun SPARC, Intel, AMD, other processor? - RAID or spreading files among multiple independant disks? - network storage or local SCSI disks? - other hardware attributes like FSB speed or CPU cache that can dramtically impact performance? Thanks again for the input! ----- Original Message ----- From: "Tim Cutts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Donny Simonton" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: "'Chad Attermann'" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Tuesday, March 30, 2004 1:05 AM Subject: Re: Best Performing Hardware/OS/MySQL? > > On 29 Mar 2004, at 23:55, Donny Simonton wrote: > > > SCSI, 15,000 RPM drives and a decent amount of memory 2-16 gigs. Dual > > procs > > definitely do help; we have tried it with dual procs with > > hyperthreading and > > without and with hyperthreading seems to be much faster. > > > > Besides that, you can run it on any OS; we use Fedora, with Linux > > 2.6.x. > > But that's our choice. > > Until recently, we ran it mainly on Tru64 Alpha boxes. We've recently > been looking at new machines. Xeon machines running Linux are great if > your databases are small enough for 2GB to be enough memory for the > MySQL server. Many of ours are not (the human genome is 3 billion base > pairs, for example, so the DNA table alone exceeds 2GB, and that pales > into insignificance compared to the annotation tables) > > For those, we are starting to look at Itanium2 machines running Debian. > Like Donny, we're using the 2.6 kernel. MySQL is about twice as fast > on an Itanium2 running the 2.6 kernel as it is on the same machine > running a 2.4 kernel. We've just received a quad-CPU-Opteron machine > and will be testing that as soon as we can find an OS for it that > actually works... > > > But just say no to IDE drives! > > SATA RAID devices aren't that bad, you know, and they are a lot cheaper > than equivalent amounts of SCSI storage. We've used NexSan ATABoy > devices, which are relatively cheap, and get you a lot of storage in > very little space (10GB in a 3U box). > > Having said that, our production MySQL servers disks are 15K RPM > FibreChannel disks on HP StorageWorks HSV110 controllers, which is > rather more at the upper end of the scale. ;-) > > Tim > > -- > Dr Tim Cutts > Informatics Systems Group > Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute > Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK > -- MySQL General Mailing List For list archives: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql To unsubscribe: http://lists.mysql.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
