On Sun, Aug 27, 2006 at 01:39:51AM -0400, e.stewart@mac.com wrote:
> I am pricing out two servers right now.
>
> One server will be an Apache/PHP web server. The other will be a
> MySQL database server.
>
> I plan to install OpenBSD 3.9-stable and PHP and MySQL packages.
>
> These server will be Dell PowerEdge 1950.
>
> Each will have a Dual Core Xeon 5060 (3.20Ghz with 1066Mhz FSB).
>
> Knowing the setups I'm gonna be using (the one's mentioned above),
> and I gonna get much performance increase by adding a second
> processor (the same type of course) to these server?
>
> Is OpenBSD and Apache/PHP gonna take advantage of a second processor
> and show some decent increase in performance or am I throwing money
> away on the second processor?

A second processor might be a good investment here. Of course, two
servers is also worth considering, as such a setup is likely to be, at
least, more robust in the face of hardware failures. (It's also more
complex...)

> Same for OpenBSD and MySQL. Am I gonna be throwing money away by
> purchasing a second processor for it?

Possibly, yes. MySQL is threaded, and the OpenBSD threads implementation
isn't the fastest possible (it's all in userland, so there's only one
kernel-level process/thread).

If using a better database (PostgreSQL comes to mind) is not an option,
you might want to consider using another system - like FreeBSD - for
this; MySQL performance isn't terribly good, even on a uniprocessor
system, anyway.

This does, of course, not mean that it is unusable by any means; many
people run MySQL on OpenBSD and are quite happy with performance,
stability, and so on. Me, I dislike MySQL for other reasons.

> Lastly, default server will be coming with 1 GB of RAM. I plan to
> upgrade both servers to 4 GB of RAM each? Is this worth spending the
> money or am I wasting it here as well?

Note you'll need a recent version to use > 2 GB RAM on i386.

> I don't mind spending the money on extra RAM and processors if the
> server setups I'm planning on using will take advantage of it. I'm
> too new to OpenBSD to know if I would wise in the extra spending or not.

Joachim