GnuCash Hardware renewal: call for input

[Herbert Thoma]

Derek Atkins schrieb:
> Hey all,
> You might not have noticed but the GnuCash "everything" servercrashed multiple times over the weekend..  These issues havebeen happening more frequently, and it's clearly a hardwareissue.  It COULD be a bad stick of RAM, or it could be amobo issue.  I could spend time trying to debug it, or,considering the machine is a 1-core Celeron 2.4GHz machinethat was acquired four or five years ago, maybe replace itwith something more modern.
> If I were to replace the hardware I think it would providemore than just SVN, Wiki, and Email service.  I was thinkingthat it would be nice to also provide nightly build serviceson various OSes, perhaps using mock to build on various RedHatand Fedora systems and providing a few Win32 VMs for dev andtest services?
> I'm looking at two difference potential boxes and lookingfor input from the people out there who might have additionalknowledge.
> Config 1 ($2974):
> - 2x Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® L5420 2.50GHz 1333FSB 12MB Cache (50W)   - Low Voltage- 4x 4GB PC2-5400 667MHz FB-DIMM- 4x 750GB SATA 7200RPM - 3.5" - Seagate Barracuda® ES.2
> Config 2 ($3468):
> - 2x Quad-Core AMD Opteron™ Model 2378 - 2.4GHz 6MB L3 Cache (75W)- 8x 2GB PC2-5300 667MHz DDR2 ECC Registered- 4x 750GB SATA 7200RPM - 3.5" - Seagate Barracuda® ES.2
> 
> Any suggestions or comments on these configs?  I really don'thave a good feel for the differences between the various CPUs,both within a line and between Intel and AMD.  In particular Isuspect I'll just be running vmware-server on the base box andthen everything else will be in VMs.
> Comments?  Suggestions?

I don't have any experience with vmware, but I did some tests with my multithreaded video encoder
(day job ;-)) on two comparable computers recently.
My findings are: If the encoder runs with a single or only a few threads (using less than half of
the cores) the Intel system is faster. If the encoder uses all cores then the AMD system is faster.
This is most likely due to the faster memory subsystem of the AMD CPUs. The differences are not
too large, max. about 30 %.

So if you expect workloads where all cores are working then the AMD system might have a
performance advantage.

 Herbert.

> -derek
> --        Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory       Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIIPB)       URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH       warlord at MIT.EDU                        PGP key available_______________________________________________gnucash-devel mailing listgnucash-devel at gnucash.orghttps://lists.gnucash.org/mailman/listinfo/gnucash-devel
> 

-- 
Herbert Thoma
Dipl.-Ing., MBA
Head of Video Group
Multimedia Realtime Systems Department
Fraunhofer IIS
Am Wolfsmantel 33, 91058 Erlangen, Germany
Phone: +49-9131-776-6130
Fax:   +49-9131-776-6099
email: tma at iis.fhg.de
www: http://www.iis.fhg.de/