<br><br><p><DEFANGED_div class="gmail_quote">On Nov 16, 2007 12:38 AM, Tim Schmidt <<a href="mailto:timschmidt@gmail.com">timschmidt@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" DEFANGED_style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
So today was my first chance to work with a new box we built just<br>yesterday... it's got 2x quad-core opterons and 32Gb ram. I noticed<br>something interesting about it's performance characteristics under<br>load as compared to typical desktop boxen: it's MUCH more responsive
<br>in interactive situations under high load than any other machine I've<br>ever worked with. Today I had it up to > 1300 15 minute load average<br>running about 4000 processes, each of which doing real honest work,
<br>and it was still quite pleasant to launch applications, switch between<br>VTs, cd around filesystems, etc. I guess all the other boxes I've<br>ever worked with (< 10Gb ram, all of them) were forced to swap before
<br>supporting enough processes to get the load that high, thus killing<br>interactivity and artificially bloating the load at the same time.<br>I'm pretty impressed that, with enough ram, even a box doing about<br>150x as much work as it should (1300 / 8 =
162.5) can still feel<br>'snappy'. :)<br><br>This sort of stuff isn't too far off from where high-end desktops are<br>now (technically, there's nothing stopping this machine from being a<br>desktop)... Can't wait until it gets cheap enough to think about for
<br>home.<br><br>--tim<br><a href="http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug" target="_blank"></a></blockquote><p><DEFANGED_div><br>If running Linux, which version?<br><br>Does the performance seem to result<br>more from all the processors or all the
<br>memory, or is it hard to tell? I'd think<br>swapping could be pretty fast in an <br>out of memory, but the instant it involves<br>a hard drive it's over.<br><br> -Bob<br> <br></p><DEFANGED_div></p><DEFANGED_div><br>