I know the question of whether or not to allocate multiple CPU's keeps
coming up and getting beaten back and forth - but a possible thought
occurred to me. Please bludgeon me as appropriate.
TL;DR question first: given sufficient RAM, is it perhaps better to have
dedicated single processor guests to handle processor intensive tasks vs
multi-processor guests?
For my particular use case, I have a single metal server supporting a
small organization. The server provides web, mail, application,
database, and basically every possible IT function for the company. At
this time, the specs are an AMD Opteron 4180 6-core w/ 32G RAM. The
host OS is Ubuntu 14.04 "Trusty" - we'll probably upgrade soon.
At present, almost nothing (actually...nothing now) runs on the bare
machine - all network services are provided by VM's. The primary VM is
an Ubuntu guest with a single core allocated. There are also a few
Windows guests for their associated application needs.
Getting to my question - among the services provided by the Ubuntu guest
is the "complete" mail server, which includes a Solr instance. Now
again, this is a small organization, less than 20 users. Solr is used
to optimize the IMAP mail searches with Dovecot and remote clients (and
it *really* works!).
Solr, and possibly LDAP (because I'm running ApacheDS instead of
OpenLDAP and that's a whole other topic), is easily the most resource
intensive service. But it's bursty - it's only an issue during a search
and that happens at most once at day. I suppose it's technically also
two processes as Dovecot needs to read the mails and send them to Solr
for processing. But because Dovecot is only reading and is heavily
optimized it doesn't seem to consume much CPU or RAM.
Yes, there are other hardware optimizations possible for me, including a
dedicated drive for the Solr indexes so Dovecot & Solr won't be
competing for drive access. Without question the best result I've
obtained has been the RAM upgrade to 32G (no surprise to anybody). The
setup I have now works - this is more of a fine-tuning and somewhat
theoretical question - and also something to influence my next rebuild
when I get a SSD and update the host OS.
--
Daniel
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