In the last episode (Oct 10), Philip Mak said:
> On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Dan Nelson wrote:
> > It depends on what you're doing with the system. If you're just
> > doing plain selects and inserts, then mysqld is going to be I/O
> > bound and it doesn't matter what OS you run it on. If you're
> > selecting a million records, doing group-bys or sorts, *AND* are
> > doing two or more of those queries at once, then you need a threads
> > package that can use both CPUs and will probably have to go Linux.
>
> It's somewhere in between what you described; there will be about
> half a million rows in the database. Most of our scripts don't do
> group-bys or sorts (a few do); it's mostly joins.
>
> How bad is FreeBSD when using MySQL on a dual processor? Does it not
> use the second processor at all or something?
That's correct; FreeBSD-4's thread model is userland threads in a
single process, managed by signals. The Linux multiple-process
threading model is available (via the Linuxthreads port), and there's
an option to build the mysql port with it, but the comments in mysql's
makefile suggest that it's not stable.
If you've only got a dual-CPU system and your support programs are perl
(or some other CPU-hungry language), then they can be doing work on one
CPU while mysql runs on the other. I suggest starting with the FreeBSD
solution since your admins are already familiar with it, and if it
turns out to be suboptimal, switch to one of the Linux distributions.
--
Dan Nelson
dnelson@stripped
