Web Server CPU selection?

[ronaldward]

I am on a budget and am trying to get as much longevity out of a planned webserver as I can. I would like to plan this right so that there is an upgrade path to this machine that is about 12-18 months out at least.

the cost difference between a 754 and 939 setup is pretty insignificant now, however dual 940's are still premium as are the the mobo's. I plan on using Server 2003 as the OS and am going to be mostly hosting only ASP.NET apps that are pretty chatty with a dedicated database server.

Any thoughts from those that have done this already would be very helpful and greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Ron

 

[flyswatter]

Are you planning to have multiple websites/accounts on this server. The 939 would suffice if it 's not too many.

 

[ronaldward]

Thanks for the reply!

Probably around a dozen or so in each of thier own application pools in iis so the inactive ones can cycle down cleanly and free up memory, but i don't think I will ever really get past a full Gig of memory being used.

At work I manage a load of Dell PowerEdges, none of the new 64ext boxes but quite a few 6650's and 2650's all which use HT. I have a question about the diff between HT and the upcoming dual core chips. Will a dual core 939 be the equivalent to a HT Xeon or TWO HT Xeons? Or somewhere in between!

The cost difference between a 939 setup and a Opteron setup is such that I can almost squeeze two 939's into the same cost as a Opteron setup and have some clustering going on if things get out of hand.

My other question is the nForce4 the only chipset that will support dual core chips or does the nForce3 chipset for 939 also plan to run dual core chips. Does VIA have support for dual core announced in any existing chipset also (although I would like to stick with nvidia chipsets)

TIA,
Ron

 

[DragonFire]

Originally posted by: ronaldward
. Will a dual core 939 be the equivalent to a HT Xeon or TWO HT Xeons? Or somewhere in between!

Dual core will be better. With the P4's HT its really faking a 2nd cpu in a effort to hide all the P4 flaws (20+ pipelines) where Dual core cpus will have two real cores to do real SMP work.

 

[uOpt]

What exactly do you do on the webserver?

if you run "passive" pages, straight from the disk to the network card, SMP has minimal benefits since all the systemcalls block each other to some degree.

SMP is better if you have lots of CPU intensive stuff going on, e.g. you run something backed by a database or written in a CPU-intensive language (pretty much all the web languages), or both.

Hyperthreading doesn't help much. Dual core will probably be full multiple processors, maybe with a shared L2 or L3 cache.

 

[ronaldward]

Thanks again for the reply's!

I think what I am going to do for the time being is to set up the web server as a single 939 on a neo board with 1GB of 3200 in RAID5 using a 3Ware 9500S-4LP with a H/S Cage.

The database server is going to be a MSI K8T Master2-FAR running dual 240's with 2GB of PC2100 ECC with the same drive system as the web server. The web server will be able to easily recycled back as a production design machine later on, but the thought is with the db server is that it is going to last a long time (fingers crossed).

All the ASP.NET apps are very database intensive and I think that the single 939 will hang for about a year as a web server then hopefully dual 940's aren't so pricey.

If anyones sees any failed logic in this I would be really appreciative to hear it. I plan on ordering next week! Since I will have both machines next to eachother I plan on doing some benchmarks to see the difference between a dual 940 and a single 939 but not in a gaming situation but a business application scenario. I will of course load HL2 on each though and see what I am missing on my 1600XP

-Ron

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Get 242s, they are only 11$ more for the OEM then the 240s and the Master2-FAR includes both coolers. Monarch has them for $203 shipped with 60 day warranty.