Rumor has it that Jay West may have mentioned these words:
>It was written....
>
>> I would agree with you if the server was a SPARCstation5 or something.
>> As you said yourself, we've got cycles to burn here.
>Just because you CAN do a thing, doesn't mean you should.
Yea, but if you don't get caught, it ain't illegal, right??? ;-)
> I view cpu cycles as precious and not to be used frivolously even when
> available in good supply. Perhaps it dates back to my mentality of
> pouring over machine code to save a cycle here and there :)
I understand that mentality as well, but most times, CPU's sit around
twiddling their thumbs waiting for the HDs (especially IDE) anyway...
If you can whiz away a few cycles to keep the CPUs *busier*, everything
speeds up.
>I wasn't saying it wasn't reliable, just not the best use of the main cpu.
>I'd also lay odds that it isn't as fast.
As fast as what? Hardware raid? Of course.
The last time I had a striped software raid setup (2 4.3G IBM UltraStar
7200rpm SCSI drives on a Diamond MultiMedia Fireport 40 (symbios chipset
wide card) I gained ~75% thruput compared to a single drive. Sure, maybe I
could have gotten 85-90% out of a hardware SCSI raid card, but I didn't
have the $300 to drop for that... And the system still *got faster* because
the CPUs weren't in IO-wait nearly as often.
It all depends on the application, just like any other benchmark; and it
all depends on where your bottleneck(s) is(are).
If IO-wait is minimal, and the CPUs are taxed (or you can foresee that they
would be in the near future) then I wholeheartedly agree with you.
Laterz,
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger "Merch" Merchberger -- sysadmin, Iceberg Computers
zmerch_at_30below.com
What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????
Received on Sun Oct 10 2004 - 14:19:31 BST