Kam Salisbury on Sun, 8 Jun 2003 13:43:08 -0400


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RE: [PLUG] Hardware question


I would like to add that AFTER you install an (Symetric Multi Processor)
SMP kernel you can easily "set afinity" (though I cannot remember how to
actuall force afinity of a process to one processor or the other under
Linux right now) for a process or just let Linux do it automatically for
you. I used to run an old PIII dual board and saw more stability (fewer
lag issues, timeouts, etc. when the first CPU was very busy)when I had
the box doing many different things at once. I would not have a dual
processor box again unless I needed to run a busy LAMP box that was also
my workstation. Simply because in te SOHO environment, my old HP PII333
workstation is way more than I need for a home server. (Truth be told, I
would rather even have a NAS unit but why bother until the workstatoin
dies.)

If your box is only going to be a workstation and not a server that sees
some use as well (mine was the server for my house as well as my
workstation) then a single processor will do fine. RAM in my opinion
will always be a key issue for single processor systems since you can
always change your RAM compliment easily (to a point) but not your
system bus speed without a motherboard and possible processor and Ram
type change.

Kam Salisbury
http://kamsalisbury.com


> -----Original Message-----
> From: plug-admin@lists.phillylinux.org 
> [mailto:plug-admin@lists.phillylinux.org] On Behalf Of mike.h
> Sent: Sunday, June 08, 2003 12:51 PM
> To: plug
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Hardware question
> 
> 
> On Sun, 2003-06-08 at 11:02, Beldon Dominello wrote:
> > > I have a chance to buy a pretty solid dual PII 1GHz 
> workstation that 
> > > I intend
> <snip> 
> 
> On Sun, 2003-06-08 at 11:49, Kevin Brosius wrote:
> > That's a good question...  Generally, the consensus seems 
> to be that 
> > 1-1, a single CPU box has more overall horsepower.  So in 
> your case, a 
> > single 2Ghz box is generally more powerful than a dual 1Ghz 
> box.  But 
> > that's a simple generalization.  The first question to ask 
> is, do any 
> > of your sound editing tools support multi-threading?  If 
> not, then I'd 
> > go for the single cpu box.
> 
> <snip>
> > unless you were sure that the apps you want to use support 
> > multi-threading.
> <snip>
> 
> Note: Multi-treading and multi-processing are NOT the same 
> thing. To get any use of dual processors, your kernel must be 
> built for it. Out of the box Linux distros are not, so you'll 
> have to compile a kernel. Application support for 
> multi-threading will not make a difference in and of itself.
> 
> In other respects, I'd tend to agree with Kevin: front side 
> bus speed could be more important than number of processors, 
> especially if your apps are i/o bound rather than cpu bound.
> 
> -- 
> -mike.h
> _________________
> mike.h@acm.org
> mike.h@stemik.com
> __________________________________________
> Democracy is the worst form of government; 
> except for all those other forms that have 
> been tried from time to time.
> 
> -Winston Churchill
> __________________________________________
> GnuPG public key:
> http://www.stemik.com/~mike.h/mike.h.asc
> 
> 

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