SQL Server Performance Forum – Threads Archive
Help with hardware choice
Hi,i’m currently looking in to finding away to increase performance for are db. We have one db that is about 12Gb in size, it is currently on a PE 2650 Dual 2.0GHz 2GB ram. With are limited budget i was thinking of buying an IBM xSeries 360 Quad P4 Xeon 1.6GHz Server that has 4GB ram. Ok i’m thinking that the increase in ram will definitely help due to the fact that the sql server is currently using all available ram. But will we get any other improvement going from faster 2.0 Dual with(HT) to a little slower 1.6 Quad with(HT). What do you think? thanks.
KENNY
Hi Kenny, it depends entirely on what your workload on the server is. If there is currently lots of parallel processing then yes doubling the number of cpus may help. SQL will always eat as much ram as it can without impacting the OS itself Have you run Profiler to check that there are no poor performing queries? Most of the time it is these that cause performance issues rather than sheer grunt of the machine. a 12GB database in itself is not really a big issue unless you have to scan through > 2GB of it on a regular basis ousting other things from the cache Cheers
Twan
i would recommend against going to older 4-way, considering the higher SQL Server licensing cost.
going to a current generation faster 2-way or better a 2 socket dual core will provide the most hardware driven performance gain,
but per twan, first effort should to find cold that could be improved
Thanks for all the input, I would like to look into the amount of parallel processing but don#%92t really know how? I have run profiler to check for slow queries and there all in pretty good shape. Thanks.
What do your performance monitor counters look like? Look at disk queue lengths (read and write seperate), cache and buffer cache hit ratios, target and total server memory, paging to get you started. See if you see any of these that are particularly high or low. Sometimes, it’s not the slow queries that kill a system. It can also be smaller queries that, even though each individual execution is very fast, can kill your system when you sum them together. MeanOldDBA
[email protected] When life gives you a lemon, fire the DBA.
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