Re: Research System

[Ulf Wendel]

Peter Crosbie wrote:
> Only one or two people are connected to the db at
> any one time and the typical queries are large
> select or update queries. We turn off all the
> proper db logging to make the tables as fast as
> possible. We can rebuild the db at any time so
> failure is not of particular concern.
[...]
> We are a Windows 2000 and XP shop although Linux
> wouldn't be out of the question if the performance
> gains where really significant. Have spec the
> following machine; dual processor, 4 GB memory,
> large ATA disks. Does MySQL use both processors
> if present? Or should we simply buy the fastest
> single processor we can?

Hi Peter!

It depends. With InnoDB you have some background threads. Such background threads would profit from more CPU's because they could run on different CPU's than the main worker threads of the connected users.

AFAIK MyISAM does not do much parallelization on the process level. Thus it would not profit that much from more CPU power unless you have many concurrent accesses.

Quite often a database is not CPU bound but I/O bound. This should be true in your case. I tend to suggest investing in a fast I/O system (RAID, SATA or SCSI) and RAM, RAM, RAM on a single CPU 64-bit system instead of a second CPU.

Check the load on your current system or a test system to find out about the bottleneck for your application and decide afterwards.

Ulf