I am putting together a heavy duty database server that will serve to a group of ~20 web servers, each supporting hundreds of thousands of users a day and tons of SQL transactions. Fedora environment.

I'm looking to identify the absolute fastest and most durable CPU available in the marketplace. Our co. has a great budget for this so the primary concern is on finding the absolute best performance specs money can buy. We are being shown a number of options by one vendor (Rackable Systems), who is suggesting high end Xeon processor with woodbridge MB..however I don't know if these processors have heating issues at the higher speeds or are realistic to take such heavy abuse as this DB server will be getting on a 24/7 basis.

Because I haven't done this sort of thing in a number of years, I'm not up to date on the latest and greatest in the market and I'm hoping to save some research time through any input I can get here on the board. Thanks in advance for any replies!

I take it that you have already ruled out HP, Sun, and IBM database server platforms?

Our HP N series platforms have no problems with millions of transactions / sec... And they aren't even top of the line. Note that I have also used database servers from both of the above platform makers mentioned, and have experienced similar results.

Sounds like you want some extreme multi-threading capability, so assuming you haven't ruled out anything, i'd be forgetting about Xeons, at the least i'd be going for 4- or 8-way dual-core Opterons in a Tyan mobo (hey, SocketF will be out in a few days).

But if you want good, then it's gotta be an HP Itanium2 server (i don't know who else makes decent Itanium systems, but HP are allegedly the best), or a Sun UltraSparc T1, T2s might be out now or soon too.

I know you said Fedora, but have you considered SuSE Enterprise Server? works best on HP Itaniums, from what i've heard. I don't know what the UltraSparcs use, methinks they use some kind of SunOS Unix. But Fedora should be usable on either of them...

T2's have been out for quite a while, but I'd still go for a clustered HP N class with the afore-mentioned Itanium's. I'd not recommend the 2's, (no recent experience with them) but HP is pushing them strongly so they must be ready for prime time.

I too strongly recommend Socket F, falling back to S940 if Socket F is not an option.

AMD64s have a substantial lead in SQL benchmarks.

Which version of Fedora do you plan to use?

And what kind of DB?

GL :-D

That's strange because Rackable is mainly an AMD shop (90%). If you want the best DB server right now it's either Opteron 285(dual) or Opteron 885(quad). Tell them you want Opteron.

Word.

Sun makes AMD based servers as well as SPARC based servers.

Both are capable of running Linux, although the SPARCs sometimes run Solaris.

Solaris replaced SunOS 14 years ago!

The SPARCs are RISC based and while decent are slower than their AMD based counterparts.

HP, IBM and others also make AMD64 servers however I would not recommend them. I would recommend AMD64s using commodity hardware if possible.

Tyan, Supermicro and Iwill make good Opteron boards.

Itaniums are not considered a good option. They completely suck in 32bit x86 mode. In native IA64 mode they run ok but they do not perform very well compared to Opterons.

OK, now you've got my interest piqued re: the HP Itanium2 server. Are these considered to be at the top of the high end DB server market?

If I could find a pre-existing solution and avoid the 1 month super slow lead time in buying from Rackable (that's how long they are telling us it will take to build the machine), I'd love to go HP, but only if that is the best money can buy, performance wise--for this SQL DB server app.

Also, FYI we have been using Postgres SQL under Fedora for this app.

Why does it matter if it sucks in x86-32? It's a heavy duty database build, which should only be running in 64bit. 51xx's are faster than current K8 based Opterons and the I2 will run circles around x86 offerings if running correct binaries.

T2's have been out for quite a while, but I'd still go for a clustered HP N class with the afore-mentioned Itanium's. I'd not recommend the 2's, (no recent experience with them) but HP is pushing them strongly so they must be ready for prime time.

Or could it be the billions HP sank into Itanium? Theres a reason HP sells over 75% of Itanium absed products (mainly because other vendors dumped the product line...). The Opterons will outperform Xeons in a 4 or 8 way configuration. While Xeon processors (Woodcrest version) are superior at lower configurations they DO NOT scale well accordignt o benchmarks. Hence the reason Dell put Opterons into its 4-way boxes (but not one or two-way). Your two choices are between an HP Itanium2 setup or a Opteron setup. I would look into the pros and cons for yourself (perhaps discuss it with a vendor that offers both like HP, look for benchmarks). Do NOT make a purchase decision based solely on what you read here....

Don't concentrate to much on CPU for an RDBMS: the most important thing is fast hard drives!
Anyway Opterons are a little faster in such applications, because EMT64 is not true 64bit processing and professional DBs (MySQL, Oracle, PostGres) always use 64bit numbers for indices calculations: benchmarks with Oracle and MySQL shows clearly that an old Opteron 240 is faster than a 5xxx Xeon. But it's a matter of very little difference, the main component in a DB is the hard drive and then... a lot of memory for big filesystem cache.

If you have a redundant and absolutely secure UPS then use XFS as a filesystem: it uses a very aggressive cache strategy, it's the fastest filesystem ever designed, but you must have a very good UPS because it can take hours to write dato onto disc in heavy load conditions.

Anyway if you plan to serve such a number of transactions per second don't focus too much on a single very fast machine: you'll be better with a cluster because hard drives would be your bottleneck, and RAID5 can't help you too much.

Any suggestions for hardware vendors that specialize in building/selling super high performance, commercial grade database servers?

Options:

0. http://penguincomputing.com/

1. http://www.sun.com/nc/2006-0711/index.jsp

2. http://www.linux.org/vendor/system/server.html

3. http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/eserver/opteron/

4. http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/ [...] 98220.html

5. my company builds custom fully optimized and tested systems for a small fee.


Again I strongly recommend Socket F or Socket 940 because they offer 2, 4, 8 times the memory and IO bandwidth as you scale up ( they scale linearly as you add CPUs ).

Memory and IO bandwidth is critical for high-end database applications.

Here are some good Woodcrest Servers:
http://www.asaservers.com/showpages.asp?pid=1063