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2.4gh P4 vs. dual P3 with RAID

  • March 7, 2004 at 12:25 am

    #107323

    Ram being equal what do you think would provide the better performance:

    2.4ghz P4

    80gb ide hd

    or

    700mhz dual processor P3

    2 channel raid controller

    2x 40gb scsi hd's (10krpm)

    I am running highly dynamic web apps from win2003 and sql2000.

    Opinions?

    Dave

    Trainmark.com IT Training B2B Marketplace
    (Jobs for IT Instructors)

  • March 7, 2004 at 6:27 am

    #497721

    My vote would be the first one, big difference in processing between those two, maybe these links would help:

    http://www.sql-server-performance.com/q&a2.asp

    http://www.sql-server-performance.com/performance_monitor_counters.asp

    http://www.sql-server-performance.com/fixing_bottlenecks.asp

    http://www.sql-server-performance.com/sql_server_performance_audit3.asp

     

    ------------

    Ray Higdon MCSE, MCDBA, CCNA

  • March 8, 2004 at 9:15 am

    #497806

    I tend to agree that it would probably be the first option. The only time I could see it being the 2nd option, is if your application is tremendously I/O heavy. Can you test these 2 systems, before making your decision?


    Rick Todd

  • March 8, 2004 at 9:29 am

    #497814

    I would always take the SCSI drives over IDE.  In my experience the disk I/O is the biggest bottleneck in the system and IDE is a massive problem for a production SQL Server.  Dual 700's are usually fine for most systems, but it depends on how processor intensive your queries are...

    Remember, IDE is constrained by its architecture.  It can only perform one activity at any one time.  Meaning, when you are dealing with a massive rowset that needs to perform an Order By operation you are gonna have to wait and wait for the initial read operations before you can write to tempdb (depending on how SQL breaks up the operation).

    Go for the fast SCSI drives.

  • March 8, 2004 at 3:52 pm

    #497912

    I agree with all in that if you are write heavy and query-light, scsi is the way to go, however, if you are having to perform complex analysis or queries, that CPU will make a big difference

    ------------

    Ray Higdon MCSE, MCDBA, CCNA

  • March 8, 2004 at 5:01 pm

    #497913

    Well I havn't run any performance audits, but for the most part it's save a form and deliver a list sort of activities. Not a whole lot of analysis going on.

    I have one or two queries with way to many joins. I was planning on fixing those with either materialized views or writting some of the information into a more denormalized reference tables as it goes along.

    I don't think the P3 is available anymore and I think they wanted too much for it anyway ($99/month with only 200gb/month traffic)

    Instead I'm going to upgrade to thier P4 with two 80gb SATA drives, each on thier own controller (1000gb/mth traffic)

    I'll RAID1 the whole thing, move backups offsite daily (maybe log ship over the WAN?) and sleep well at night.

    My goal is data protection without harming performance too badly. while staying within the pocketbook of course

    thanks for your help guys.

    Dave

    Trainmark.com IT Training B2B Marketplace
    (Jobs for IT Instructors)

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