Re: When should I worry?

On Tuesday 12 June 2007 06:04, Tom Allison wrote:
> On Jun 12, 2007, at 12:00 AM, Greg Smith wrote:
> > On Mon, 11 Jun 2007, Tom Allison wrote:
> >> All of this was run on a Pentium II 450 MHz with 412MB RAM and a
> >> software linear 0 pair or UDMA 66 7200RPM 8MB Cache drives (really
> >> old) on seperate IDE channels with ReiserFS disk format.
> >
> > Sometimes it's not clear if someone can speed up what they're doing
> > simply by using more expensive hardware. In your case, I think
> > it's safe to say you've got quite a bit of margin for improvement
> > that way when you run into a problem.
>
> No doubt! But I think it's worth nothing how much performance I
> *can* get out of such an old piece of hardware.
>
> My other computer is a Cray. No, that's the bumper sticker on my car.
>
> My other computer is an Athlong 64 2.?GHz with a single disk but less
> RAM. It's a xen virtual machine that I'm renting, so increasing the
> power of the machine is actually very easy to do, but not yet required.
>
> But I was impressed with how well it works on such an old machine.
>

When you're running these test, make sure to look for where your bottlenecks
are. Going from a Pentium II to an Atholon may sound great, but if your
bottlenecks are all i/o based, it won't give you nearly the jump you might be
expecting.

--
Robert Treat
Database Architect
http://www.omniti.com