[GRLUG] large systems performance

[Bob Kline]

On Nov 16, 2007 12:38 AM, Tim Schmidt <timschmidt at gmail.com> wrote:

> So today was my first chance to work with a new box we built just
> yesterday...  it's got 2x quad-core opterons and 32Gb ram.  I noticed
> something interesting about it's performance characteristics under
> load as compared to typical desktop boxen: it's MUCH more responsive
> in interactive situations under high load than any other machine I've
> ever worked with.  Today I had it up to > 1300 15 minute load average
> running about 4000 processes, each of which doing real honest work,
> and it was still quite pleasant to launch applications, switch between
> VTs, cd around filesystems, etc.  I guess all the other boxes I've
> ever worked with (< 10Gb ram, all of them) were forced to swap before
> supporting enough processes to get the load that high, thus killing
> interactivity and artificially bloating the load at the same time.
> I'm pretty impressed that, with enough ram, even a box doing about
> 150x as much work as it should (1300 / 8 = 162.5) can still feel
> 'snappy'.  :)
>
> This sort of stuff isn't too far off from where high-end desktops are
> now (technically, there's nothing stopping this machine from being a
> desktop)...  Can't wait until it gets cheap enough to think about for
> home.
>
> --tim
> <http://shinobu.grlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/grlug>


If running Linux,  which  version?

Does the performance seem to result
more from all the processors or all the
memory, or is it hard to tell?  I'd think
swapping could be pretty fast in an
out of memory, but the instant it involves
a hard drive it's over.

    -Bob
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