From: Sasha Pachev
Date: March 19 1999 12:09am
Subject: Re: fastCPU vs moreRAM
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/mysql/530
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Scott Moseman wrote:
> 
> A partner and myself are going to be building a box to start our web dev
> and hosting side business.  We're going to be running Linux with Apache
> and MySQL (with Perl as the interface).  Should be pretty low load at
> first, but we want to let the machine be as expandable as possible.
> 
> My question is for the intial build, should we focus more on faster CPU's
> or on more RAM?  I'm curious as to which would be a better performer.  I
> know it's good to have plenty of both *grin* but we (of course) have a
> limited budget initially and would like to know which route is better to
> start up with.
> 
> Thanks for any advice,
> 

You are dealing with to issues here:

a) mysql performance
b) perl performance

You need to answer the following questions:

1) How many Perl CGI hits per second are you going to
have?
2) How many queries per second?
3) How big will the database be?
4) What kind of queries are you going to run?

If the database is small, queries simple, but you get
many hits on CGI's, I would up the CPU, or re-write the
CGI's in C, and/or use Fast CGI, or use mod_perl. I like
C, so I myself would probably go for the C option, but
this is just my personal preference.

If the database is big, though, RAM may be more
important than CPU. The bigger buffers you could have
the less you have to access the disk, the faster your
queries are. Ideally you want all of the database to fit
into RAM if that is at all possible. Then your queries
are lightening fast compared to the dist stuff.

Anyware, short answer is it depends on what you are
doing


-- 
Sasha Pachev
http://www.sashanet.com/ (home)
http://www.direct1.com/ (work)