Re: Practical Oracle 8i by Jonathan Lewis?

> I read his book too, I think it's excellent.

I'm in the process of reading his book now. So far, I've found it to be enjoyable and refreshing. It definitely doesn't rehash the same things one finds over and over again.  

> There is a little comment I disagreed with in there though, he states
> that more slower CPUs is better than a few fast ones. My take on this
> is that it's better to have fewer, fast CPUs than more slower ones. My
> servers don't have more than a handful of active sessions at a time,
> though -- maybe that explains why I differ on this point. Also my
> servers only have 2 CPUs at best, he may have been talking about 5+ CPU
> machines.

Feel free to correct me on this one (Jonathan Lewis, James Morle, Steve Adams) but this has to do with queueing theory and how multiple CPUs handle multiple processes. If you only have a handful of active sessions at a time (thus a low number of processes), then I believe that you will find a few but fast CPUs will perform really well. But you don't have as much contention for CPUs and other system resources as you do when you get a very large number of processes. In that case, more slower CPUs is better than fewer faster ones. This is assuming that your total MHz is the same, i.e. 4 * 200 MHz = 2 * 400 MHz. In this case, go with the 4 slower CPUs rather than the 2 faster ones. But in the end, you'd probably be better off with more, faster CPUs!!!

HTH,
Brian

-- 
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Brian Peasland
Raytheons Systems at
  USGS EROS Data Center
These opinions are my own and do not
necessarily reflect the opinions of my 
company!
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