Performance of P4-HT against P4-D

[mflorell]

After one solid day in full production I have a good estimate of the difference between an Intel Pentium4 with Hyperthreading and a Pentium4-D, which is the first generation of P4 chips with a dual core in it.

The P4-D had HALF the average load-average of the P4-HT after 6 hours in full production. Also, the CPU idle was 10% higher on the P4-D. All of this even though the P4-D system had slightly more traffic on it.

Both servers are running Linux 2.6.17 SMP kernels, have 2GB RAM and are rated at 3.4GHz.

The P4-HT has 1024k cache while the P4-D has 2048k cache.

I will be putting together a new Intel Core 2 Duo system next week and will post my results when that system goes into production.

My recommendation is to go with Dual core if possible.

[enjay]

I will definately be going with the Dcore systems in the future for now the ones Im running are P4 XEON 3.0's & 3.4's with 2048 cache they work ok but seem to work exponentially better in a dual CPU.

[kchung]

mflorell: didja compile x86 or x64 mode?

[mflorell]

Each was just compiled and optimized for Pentium 4-family processors. Neither are 64bit.

[kchung]

All of the new Intel Pentium D processors are 64bit capable. I'd love to see if there was any difference in performance though.

[gerski]

I'm using P4 3.2 Dual Core with 2GB RAM and im running about 14 seats sometimes load less than 1.0 to 2.0, im using recording on demand...

[enjay]

Thats about my load with:

Dual 3.0ghz P4-HT - 2Gig RAM 25sec_delay_recording - 1.0-2.0 load avg..

[alexjones]

After one solid day in full production I have a good estimate of the difference between an Intel Pentium4 with Hyperthreading and a Pentium4-D, which is the first generation of P4 chips with a dual core in it.

The P4-D had HALF the average load-average of the P4-HT after 6 hours in full production. Also, the CPU idle was 10% higher on the P4-D. All of this even though the P4-D system had slightly more traffic on it.

Both servers are running Linux 2.6.17 SMP kernels, have 2GB RAM and are rated at 3.4GHz.

The P4-HT has 1024k cache while the P4-D has 2048k cache.

I will be putting together a new Intel Core 2 Duo system next week and will post my results when that system goes into production.

My recommendation is to go with Dual core if possible.

Is AMD Dual Core Opteron better the Xeon Dual Core?

[kchung]

Note that theres MANY different versions of the Xeon Dual Core series.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_In ... -Core_Xeon

I believe it would be safe to say Core microarchitecture based Xeons would be competitive with AMD's dual core offerings.

Note that memory interconnects for AMD processors are still superior than Intel's, so for memory bandwidth and latency intensive stuff, AMD has the advantage.

Please note that my statements are conjectures when relating to running VICIDIAL. I have no experience comparing the two platforms with vicidial.

[marvin]

how about intel Intel Xeon Processor 3.4 GHz vs Intel Core 2 Duo Processor E6300

which u think has better performance?

[mflorell]

There isn't really much difference between Xeon processors and Pentium-class Processors. Core 2 Duo should preform just as well as a comperable new Xeon dual core.

[alexjones]

What kind of servers do you guys use? wich one is more reliable?

[mflorell]

We are starting to move to Intel Dual Core systems from Intel Pentium4 systems. We use only Asus motherboards, usually with 1GB-2GB DDR2 RAM. We also put LSILogic MegaRAID 320-1 PCI cards in our servers for reliability and better recording quality on loaded servers.

For T1/E1 cards we have both Digium and Sangoma cards in production.

[alexjones]

We are starting to move to Intel Dual Core systems from Intel Pentium4 systems. We use only Asus motherboards, usually with 1GB-2GB DDR2 RAM. We also put LSILogic MegaRAID 320-1 PCI cards in our servers for reliability and better recording quality on loaded servers.

For T1/E1 cards we have both Digium and Sangoma cards in production.

You use Xeon Dual Core or the new Core 2 Duo?

[mflorell]

We just got our first Core 2 Duo in last week and were hoping to put it in production this week, but it looks like it'll have to wait until next week because we had two servers fail this week(SATA drives actually). The other Dual core CPUs that we use are the Intel first generation dual cores, the Pentium4-D series, and those perform wonderfully.

[kchung]

Have you considered using WDC Raptors in place of SCSI to minimize cost? They claim to be 'enterprise' quality drives...

[mflorell]

For now I won't use anything but SCSI for servers that need to do a lot of recording, but the Western Digital Raptor drives do look like an interesting option.

Here's an in-depth review of WDC Raptor SATA drives:
http://www.storagereview.com/articles/2 ... DFD_1.html

It looks like a 15k Maxtor Atlas drive still stomps on the Raptor in terms of random server disk IO.

[bloureiro]

What is the ASUS mother board model, you are using with the P4-D and the P4 core 2 duo processors?

[mflorell]

Asus P5WDG2 WS Professional is what we've been using recently.

[Op3r]

Does any one know any core 2 duo boards compatible with centos?

preferably asus boards

[mflorell]

I would imagine just about any of them would be. I have several different Asus motherboards running Intel Core 2 Duo processors right now with no issues on Slackware, and CentOS should run them just fine as well.

[Op3r]

care to tell what those asus motherboards are? A client of mine got one and like we have a problem with installing centos without patching it

I was thinking if we just go get Dual Core but they are going to use VICIDIAl on a single server and I dont want them to go overboard by telling them to get a xeon instead. ''

[mflorell]

What version of CentOS?

Any reason you don't want to use Slackware 11?

[Op3r]

Centos 4.4

The reason why I dont use slackware is because centos seems to be easier to manage than slackware and the deployment is quite fast and lastly the client's tech team can be easily trained to support the server.

anyway, Gardo and I began talking about core 2 duo motherboards and Centos and it seems the only way to get around the notoriously sata problem is to get a pci sata card or wait for centos 5.

[gardo]

yep! centos 5 has arrived! will try that one out later. another thing i did to bypass the sata driver problems is to install centos 4.4 via an external usb cdrom/dvdrom.

[tbenson]

linux pci=nomsi helps with some of the disk issues, but then its usually not finding the sata drive to install onto, not installing from cdrom....

Trevor

[eijal]

We just got our first Core 2 Duo in last week and were hoping to put it in production this week, but it looks like it'll have to wait until next week because we had two servers fail this week(SATA drives actually). The other Dual core CPUs that we use are the Intel first generation dual cores, the Pentium4-D series, and those perform wonderfully.

Matt I have these questions about Intel Core 2 Duo processor:

1. Are the Core 2 Duo in production?
2. Which Distros did you try?
3. Did you try with Centos?
4. Did you find any issued with these processor?
5. Is the Core 2 Duo a 32 or 64 bits processor? OR Do the applications of 64 bits work faster than of the applications of 32 bits?
6. Of course you installed slackware with Intel Core 2 Duo. What version did you use of slackware and Ultimate Boot CD? Any advices?

Thanks a lot

[mflorell]

I have now installed Intel Core 2 Duo and Quad dialer servers and the performance has been extremely good. I have not had time to do a comparison with charts and such, but the load is much less on these newer machines than on the non-dual-core servers. I hope to put out some stats later in December.