Article Suggestion: Low Core, High GHz Speedball

[Frank Rizzo]

I have browsed this site on and off for years; I marvel at the latest twitter postings stating EPYC / Platinum reviews of zillion core, terrabyte ram and nvme raid rigs.

That's great and all if you are running a company the size of GE but what is lacking, is regular reviews of smaller use speedball rigs.

I run a server that handles a handful of users at any one time. They run reports that are generated in milliseconds, and sometimes seconds. There are regular updates to the databases each day, which take many minutes. In this instance a 128 core quad 8 way rig with terrabytes of ram is absolutely no use at all.

So what about some reviews of the latest Intel / AMD rigs that have the highest clock speeds? What about different types of ram settings for the best throughput and latency for mysql databases that are run in Linux ramdrives? What about articles on tuning Linux servers for such rigs; the O/S, hardware and CFLAG settings?

If you had to build a rig today, which is used to serve a handful of users at a time, who require data to be retrieved from a database, collated, prepared and served as fast as possible what technology would you use?

 

[Patrick]

@Frank Rizzo great idea. How should we generate data? Have a docker image?

 

[_alex]

maybe the UP Xeon e5, like 1680 (or the equiv. in the SP line) with RAM as fast as possible. Also the higher clocked e3 when max RAM isn't that important could work. As you run the db on ramdisk anyway (i guess mainly for reading/reports/analytics) there is not really a need for ecc and you could go with high-end overclocked consumer CPU, too.

btw, i made good experience putting only the MySQL tmp tables on ramdisk and minimize logging and other io when speed is more important than consistency.

 

[mstone]

There's a big chicken and egg problem in the industry: intel has fairly crappy single socket CPU offerings which they won't make more compelling because of low sales volume. The big manufacturers don't bother making competitive single socket motherboards because of low sales volume. So when you price 1s vs 2s there's not that much difference in retail cost for an arbitrarily large bump in performance and capability. Which is crazy, but really drives down the volume of 1s sales.

 

[Diavuno]

That question really depends on the work being done...
Is proper server equipment required or is there acceptable limits? (IE lower speed/higher CAS ECC RAM)
Supermicro does make proper server boards that take I7's (turbo 4.7) or xeons up to 4GHZ with more mem channels.... but the I7 is only 6 cores.