10 Oct
2004
10 Oct
'04
7:19 a.m.
Rumor has it that Jay West may have mentioned these words:
It was written....
Yea, but if you don't get caught, it ain't illegal, right??? ;-)
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. 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(a)30below.com
What do you do when Life gives you lemons,
and you don't *like* lemonade?????????????