Dual Core vs Dual CPU - Which One?

[art]

Hi All,


I need to build 2 machines. One will be a web server running Apache,
and the other will be a mail server running Postfix. I'll be running
Red Hat.

I have a T1, but what I am wondering about is the speed of the machine
itself to deal with all the processing of emails and such....... the
system does in excess of 50,000 emails per day.

Anyhow, which is better for this kind of job, a dual core processor, or
a motherboard with 2 CPU's??


Thanks!

 

[Robert Redelmeier]

I need to build 2 machines. One will be a web server running
Apache, and the other will be a mail server running Postfix.
I'll be running Red Hat.

I have a T1, but what I am wondering about is the speed of the
machine itself to deal with all the processing of emails and
such....... the system does in excess of 50,000 emails per day.

<Yawn> A T1 is 1.5 Mbit/s. Your 50 kemails is ~500 Mbyte, or
about 45 minutes of full load on the line. This is extremely
light load that a 486 should be able to handle

A much bigger problem are the add-ons like feeble attempts
at spam filtering, and web scripts/CGI executables. These
add load like no tomorrow.

Anyhow, which is better for this kind of job, a dual core
processor, or a motherboard with 2 CPU's??

I tend to prefer dual core for the quicker memory access
(reduced arbitration), but there are a few cases where
dual CPU works better. Whatever you do, get lots of RAM!

-- Robert

 

[Nate Edel]

itself to deal with all the processing of emails and such....... the
system does in excess of 50,000 emails per day.

Anyhow, which is better for this kind of job, a dual core processor, or
a motherboard with 2 CPU's??

There isn't likely to be a huge difference in many cases, although
especially for the mail server, the better IO system on many server boards
(usually dual sockets) is going to be an advantage.

If you go with AMD or with the newer Intel Xeon platforms (5000 or 5100
series, though those would be dual dual-cores), two CPUs will let you double
your memory bandwidth compared to a single dual-core CPU. That'll be an
advantage, particularly for the web server if it's CPU bound.

For the mail server, I'd be more concerned with your I/O system than with
the particular CPU; high volume mail servers are murder on a typical I/O
system.

Both applications are very highly multithreaded, so dual duals (Xeon
5000/5100 or the Opteron 265 or higher) might be a real advantage. (The
Xeon 5000s also have hyperthreading, which might be worthwhile on the Apache
server.)