Building my own seerver - what is most important?

  • Hi

    Probably been asked a thousand times, but if you had a just one component that you could upgrade to the best, would it be Processor, HardDrive(speed), or RAM ?

    The given tasks of the server would be to crunch numbers (many millions of records) by running queries as fast as possible. Nothing else.

    I do understand that they all must work together, and there are dozens of other factors, but just imagine you only had one choice::pinch:

  • That would depend of my analysis of my current resource usage and my expectations for change and/or growth in my future workloads.

    [font="Times New Roman"]-- RBarryYoung[/font], [font="Times New Roman"] (302)375-0451[/font] blog: MovingSQL.com, Twitter: @RBarryYoung[font="Arial Black"]
    Proactive Performance Solutions, Inc.
    [/font]
    [font="Verdana"] "Performance is our middle name."[/font]

  • Yes, understood that it depends on a lot of things, but I guess the nature of the question is for a server that I just wanted to run large number crunches - (lets say it was just for the day) what would be most important - I am not designing this for anyone or any comercial use. - and lets just say the query is "select * from massive data" - I am not looking for the quality of the query - just which component would most influence that query speed ? and the choices are processor, disk speed, or RAM

  • It is just not possible to give any kind of valid answer to a question like that without more information.

    For instance, how would you answer a question like this:

    I need to get from point A to point B. What four wheeled vehicle would get me there the fastest?

    No one can answer a question like that without some information (or unjustified assumptions) about the presence of roads, fuel, and/or traffic.

    You keep saying "Number-Crunching", so if you are sure that you workload is calculation intensive, then sure, get more CPU.

    [font="Times New Roman"]-- RBarryYoung[/font], [font="Times New Roman"] (302)375-0451[/font] blog: MovingSQL.com, Twitter: @RBarryYoung[font="Arial Black"]
    Proactive Performance Solutions, Inc.
    [/font]
    [font="Verdana"] "Performance is our middle name."[/font]

  • Are you hosting any website?

  • Great, thank you for that input, sorry for not providing detail, etc - just wanted a little start on my building the machine - so now I will focus on getting a very fast processor.

    But I don't think that analogy was totally correct about "what vehicle would be best to get from point A to B"

    I think the better analogy to what I was asking would be: what does someone feel is the most important factor for a 4 wheel vehicle to have when getting to point A to B the fastest; good wheels?, best grade of gas? or biggest engine?

  • Vijaya,

    No, no hosting - just pure number crunch; run several queries that involve updating, filtering and sorting several millions of records, hosestly, just want a feel for what should buy in terms of parts, to build my machine - it'snot a lot of money and I may be using the server for other things.... I not really designing the machine for someone else or trying to make money off the design...

  • Found this link, I thought it was the best answer to my type of question I have ever read.

    I am including it in case anyone else had a similar question.

    http://www.sql-server-performance.com/articles/per/performance_audit_part3_p1.aspx

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