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beethoven
Starting Member
7 Posts |
 Posted - 2002-10-24 : 11:15:03
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| Here's my current hardware:Quad P3 Xeon w/ 1MB cache @ 500MHz4GB RAMSQL 7 Standard Ed.We are looking at upgrading from SQL Standard to SQL Enterprise to take advantage of > 2GB of memory. However, purchasing 4 SQL per-proc licenses is quite expensive, so we are instead evaluating upgrading the server to a faster dual-processor system and only licensing 2 processors.Currently our server peaks at 80% CPU usage and can sustain 50-60% usage during the busiest times of the day.We are looking at upgrading to a Dell PowerEdge 2650, with two Pentium Xeon 512KB 2.8GHz processors and 6GB of memory (basically maxing out the server). Do you think this server would support our existing load? These Xeon processors in the 2650 are not the P3 Xeons, nor are they the higher-end Xeon MP processors. I guess they could be called P4-Xeons (although Intel doens't use that term).The server and and upgraded disk array will basically be free if I can license 2 instead of 4 processors...but in the end, the whole point of this is to increase performance.Edited by - beethoven on 10/24/2002 11:16:43 |
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robvolk
Most Valuable Yak
15732 Posts |
Posted - 2002-10-24 : 13:04:25
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| Well, before you upgrade the server, have you done any performance testing and optimization? Does this machine do anything other than SQL Server (like IIS, Exchange, ???) Have you looked at the memory utilization to see if the RAM is always in use? What kind of drive array (if any) do you have? How many users are accessing the server, and how are they accessing it (web app, custom app) ? What other kinds of operations does this SQL Server perform (heavy batch UPDATEs, bulk loading of data, replication) ?If you haven't done any kind of performance testing, it's a bit rash to spend money on a brand new server with more RAM...when you don't know if RAM is the problem or whether more will solve the problem. BTW, you didn't say if the performance was unacceptable or not. 80% peak CPU utilization isn't necessarily a bad thing, and some performance tuning can make a huge difference in improving performance. |
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beethoven
Starting Member
7 Posts |
Posted - 2002-10-24 : 13:43:35
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| This server is dedicated to SQL.From my performance monitoring, I can see that the free buffers hover around 500, but during peak times they drop down to 0, then back to 500 after flushing (in a saw tooth-looking graph). The disk usage also becomes quite heavy during these times (% disk time ~50% and disk queue length at 2-3). The current disk subsystem is 5 disks in RAID 5 for data, and 3 disks in RAID 5 for logs.The performance seen by the users isn't too bad, but the counters I'm watching tell me there is a memory shortage that can be fixed by either increasing memory and/or speeding up the disks accesses.Normally, I wouldn't consider upgrading to enterprise in this situation, but we have a large chunk of "use it or lose it" money. Purchasing enterprise, I thought, would be a worth-while expenditure. Upgrading the hardware and reducing the licensing costs would probably be an even better way to spend that money.The new system will also include a new disk array that can support RAID 1 (or RAID 10), and also seperate the tempdb to it's own set of disks. |
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Page47
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker
2878 Posts |
Posted - 2002-10-24 : 14:07:34
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quote:
The current disk subsystem is 5 disks in RAID 5 for data
I hope your databases are read-only, otherwise RAID5 is a very poor choice for transactional systems ...Jay White{0} |
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beethoven
Starting Member
7 Posts |
Posted - 2002-10-24 : 14:15:52
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Heh...don't blame me, that's the way it was when I got here.  Unfortunately, we don't have enought storage to go to RAID 1; however, this upgrade would allow us to do that. |
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MichaelP
Jedi Yak
2489 Posts |
Posted - 2002-10-24 : 15:48:45
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| I think if you go RAID 0/1 (RAID 10), get and use 6GB's of memory, and have the two newer procs, that should be a good bit faster than what you have now.SQL Server is all about RAM and Disk. I think if you are able to change even those two things, you should be in pretty good shape.Rememeber, 1 processors at 1Ghz each is better than 4 Processors @500Mhz usually because of the overhead to use the addtional processors.Michael<Yoda>Use the Search page you must. Find the answer you will.</Yoda> |
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