[AccessD] Needs analysis

Hello John,

Which motherboard and processor do you recommend to achieve 16 cores ?

thanks

Mark



On 19 June 2010 16:56, jwcolby <jwcolby at colbyconsulting.com> wrote:

> I am about to upgrade my SQL server.  Currently I run a quad core with 16
> gigs ram, using data on
> raid6 arrays with a dedicated raid co-processor.  I have an opportunity to
> build a server that
> better meets my needs but I need to discover what those needs are.
>
> As I have posted previously I process fairly substantial lists where (for
> example) I will join a
> table with 20 million names to a table with 65 million names on a sha hash
> field and select by a
> half dozen field criteria.  Stuff like that.  My databases are, generally
> speaking, read-only.  This
> is not transaction stuff, but rather "data mining" kind of stuff.
>
> These queries can take a long time to run, tens of minutes or more.  What I
> would like to find out
> is what is the bottleneck.  If I increased my memory to 32 gigs would that
> be enough?  Would 64 gigs
> be better or not be any better than 32 gigs?  How much memory do these
> queries want?  If I increased
> my cores to 8 or 16 would that be enough?  How many threads would these
> queries use?  If I moved
> some of the database onto SSDs would that help more than additional memory?
>  How much time /
> resource is spent loading the data off of disks.
>
> I have absolutely no idea how to discover this kind of information.  I am
> going to have X dollars to
> use to build a server, and of course X is never enough, so I need to decide
> whether to spend more on
> cores, memory or disks and in what combination.  As an example I have
> enough to buy either 24 cores
> and 32 gigs of memory, or 16 cores and 64 gigs of ram, or 16 cores and 32
> gigs of ram and a bunch of
> SSDs.
>
> I am pretty sure that regardless of what I do I will get a substantial
> performance leap, however
> maximizing that performance leap is still a good thing.
>
> Any help appreciated.  BTW, I am NOT a DBA so if you give advice like "look
> at the logs", please
> give specific directions on how to do that.
>
> --
> John W. Colby
> www.ColbyConsulting.com
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