Re: [PLUG] Intel Atom Servers

[Julien Vehent <julien@linuxwall.info>]

On 12.10.2011 14:03, peering@philaix.org wrote:

> Wanted to get some thoughts on Intel Atom processors for server 
> builds.
> Years ago, I used to build Intel servers (this was back when Dell's
> weren't cheap and didn't fully support linux). Then I started using
> Dells. But now I am back to building OEM systems, mainly because of
cost.
> The environment does not require any redundancy since its clustered, 
> so
I
> can build really affordable pizza-box 1U servers.
>
> I want to keep the power usage down, so I thought about using Atom
> cpu's. My only fear is my experience from using an Acer Netbook with 
> an
> Atom CPU running Ubuntu. It was DOG slow...
>
> The servers are a MIMEdefang/sendmail/SpamAssassin cluster. They will
> have max memory, but the Atom CPU will need to do some work and 
> process
> those messages. Granted its not major number crunching... But my
> experience with that Netbook doesn't make me feel good. Heck, maybe 
> the
> Netbook was slow because Ubuntu desktop was so overloaded, plus all 
> the
> CPU overhead of running X11, etc.,.
>
> Power being equal, I can run (8) Atom servers clustered, or (1) 
> regular
> Xeon.
>
> The (8) Atom servers will definitely have better disk IO numbers 
> since
> my load is spread across 8 disks - running pure native SATA no raid.
> Compare that to (1) Xeon server running Raid 1 on SATA.
>
> Thanks, Adam


ATOM cpu is my base setup for any home/sbs linux box I build. It works 
great, doesn't heat up, and each box with 2 HD in soft raid 1 consumes 
~30W.

Obviously, the cpu won't be as fast as a Xeon, but if you mostly 
process emails with it, you don't care that spamassassin takes 300ms 
more than on a bigger CPU. Everything is asynchronous already.
In my test setup, I even use the atom to serve the webmail with nginx, 
php5-cgi and roundcubemail, and it works great for a small (<20) number 
of users.

As a general rule, we use a lot less CPU than we think we do.

Julien
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