Gigabit ethernet cards

[William Lovaton]

Hi Russell,


El lun, 17-05-2004 a las 14:34, Russell Coker escribió:
> On Tue, 18 May 2004 05:19, William Lovaton <williama_lovaton at coomeva.com.co> 
> wrote:
> > I have a haevy enterprise web application (Apache/PHP) running with 600
> > users (active sessions) on a 4x SMP Pentium III 550MHz each (RH9 -
> > 2.4.20smp).  Right now the poor server is very stressed and I have
> > detected bottlenecks in the network (100Mbps) due to the high traffic
> > between the web server and the database.  So, I am planning to make the
> > leap from 100 to 1GB network.
> 
> Gigabit networking can take quite a lot of CPU power.  PHP applications are 
> often CPU hungry and if you are doing enough to fill a 100baseT network then 
> it's quite likely that you are already running low on CPU power.

Mmmm... interesting, I'm concerned about what you say regarding to
Gigabit but not for PHP... in my case, I use an OPCode cache so the
compilation overhead is completely eliminated.  This is a lot useful,
without it the server would burst into flames.  :-)


> If you get a new 2x SMP system (which will have more than twice the CPU power 
> of your existing system) you will probably have 2x Gigabit Ethernet ports on 
> the motherboard.  The Broadcom chipsets which seem common for such 
> motherboards have worked well for me in the past.

I agree with you, I need more CPU power (550 is not enough) but we have
been optimizing the code, the queries, detecting bottlenecks, etc before
making the upgrade.

I can measure execution times and there are some queries that takes,
let's say 2 seconds executing and 10 seconds fetching the result sets.
In this case I can't reduce the number of records because I need the
all.  The number is not big though.


-William