Hi Steve

Good to see that 16 cores isn't the limit.

I didn't think you could get Intel CPUs that have 6 cores and don't have hyperthreading. I know there is an AMD 6 core CPU. Did you try the hyperthreading and it didn't help or is there a chip I didn't know about?

At one stage we tried a 10gig RAM disk for temp but found that it actually made our queries slightly slower overall but then we have the disks locally not over iSCSI.

Thanks
Bernard

--- In firebird-support@yahoogroups.com, Steve Wiser <steve@...> wrote:
>
> We are running a couple of servers with 4 6-core Intel CPUs (no
> hyperthreading so 24 cores available to linux) and 64 GB of RAM. We are
> using 32 GB of the RAM as memory and the other 32 GB as a RAM disk for
> the temp directory for Firebird. The system stores the DB on an iSCSI
> SAN and it runs great.
>
> -steve
>
> On 4/28/2010 3:25 AM, bernard_cleary wrote:
> >
> > Hi
> >
> > ObjectMastery manage a large firebird database for one of our clients.
> > The database is currently about 100gig and is about 8 years old. We
> > are currently running firebird CS 2.1.2 on a linux box. We have 5 main
> > servers. The primary server is a dual CPU quad core box with 64 gig
> > ram and 12 SAS hard drives. The drives are set up into 2 areas. 10
> > drives in raid 10 for the database and 2 drives in raid 0 for the temp
> > directory and any other temporary data. This main server generally has
> > around 300 users and about 30 to 40 active queries. It currently does
> > about 3 million transactions a day mostly during the core hours of 8am
> > to 6pm. It used to do as many as 10 million transactions a day but we
> > used FBScanner to find a number of inefficient processes and we fixed
> > them or moved them onto our secondary servers. We have a copy on four
> > other servers which we keep up to date via replication. These servers
> > run our larger reports. Some are equivalent to our main server and
> > some are newer boxes with a single intel quad core (8 threads) and a
> > mixture of Intel SSDs and SAS hard drives.
> >
> > Our main server is now nearly 3 years old so we are considering
> > retiring it to less strenuous duties. My question is what should the
> > replacement box be? What is the best hardware that Firebird can
> > effectively use? With the new intel 8 core (16 thread) and AMD 12 core
> > CPUs you can now get boxes with up to 64 cores (128 threads). You can
> > also get up to a terabyte of ram. Both these numbers are going up
> > quickly. The problem is I have never heard anyone running Firebird on
> > anything above 16 cores. Does the plan for 2.5 and 3 allow for better
> > utilisation of these new CPUs? My other thought is are SSDs worth it?
> > If you can afford enough RAM the hard drive doesn't seem to be a major
> > factor.
> >
> > I'd be interested to talk to anyone that is running similar large
> > systems. What hardware they are using and how they have it tweaked.
> >
> > Bernard
> >
> >
>
> --
> Steve Wiser
> President
> Specialized Business Software
> 6325 Cochran Road, Unit 1
> Solon, OH 44139
>
> www.specializedbusinesssoftware.com
> (440) 542-9145 - fax (440) 542-9143
> Toll Free: (866) 328-4936
>
>
>
>
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