QuadCore/DualCore differences to modperl/Apache/mySQL

[Will Fould <wi...@gmail.com>]

Hello

A lot of hype has surrounded quad core vs dual core processors.

We're buying a handful of new machines and I'm trying to make the best
weighted decision for our budget.

My very brief research indicates that ironically, a slightly faster dual
core (for example, a recent Opteron 22xx processor), would likely be better
off on a heavily loaded webserver with decent RAM, than a similar or slighly
slower clocked quad core processor since it's unlikely that we'll be taking
advantage of any differences between them. The thought we have now is to buy
2 dual cores instead of 1 or 2 quad cores for each server. In general, we
spend a lot of time doing database lookups and page formation. We'll also be
running memcached on at least some of these machines.

Might this generally true (or true-enough) for other
apache/modperl/DBI-based web applications?  If not, what else might I
consider to be significant factors?

If someone has a suggested configuration, that would be nice to hear about
too.

Thanks in advance!

Re: QuadCore/DualCore differences to modperl/Apache/mySQL

[Perrin Harkins <pe...@elem.com>]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 8:09 PM, Will Fould <wi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> We're buying a handful of new machines and I'm trying to make the best
> weighted decision for our budget.

Buy the cheapest CPUs available.  You will barely touch them.  Spend
the money on more RAM.

- Perrin