How many have moved to dual Opteron servers ?
 

As outlined at http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=160103 dual AMD64 Opteron cpus give more bang for the buck when it comes to Apache and MySQL for high concurrency handling.

So how many of you folks have moved or considered moving from Intel/Xeon based servers to dual Opteron servers ?

If you have moved, care to share how it has improved your forum's performance compared to before ?

We're looking at doing that in about 12 months. For now our server more than meets our needs.

I am using two dual opteron 252 8gb ram scsi disk servers ( Webserver and Mysql connected via LAN). Performace is awesome with Windows server.
I will never use Apache and linux combination for webserver anymore.
Never seen my site that fast before
I do advice dual opterons to anyone who can find a good Datacenter.
I am at one of the DCs in L.A

We moved from dual Xeon 2.8s to dual Opteron 246s and noticed a decient improvment. In the process we also were using IDE drives with the Xeons and have SCSI with the Opterons so I imagine that helped as well.

Not at the moment, our Xeon is running fine. You're also limited by what your choice of DC actually offers.

Dual Xeon's here. Plenty happy with'em.

Eva

As you know we have 8 massively powerful dual xeons and are bumping up against our limit. Our intention was to have all our sites on one db server with 3 slaves for searches and reads. This wasn't working so we moved our largest site to it's own dual xeon with a second for searching, and left the remaining sites on the other two boxes. This has really freed up a ton of capacity, but who knows what will happen when the world cup comes and our traffic goes 500%

4x Web servers: Intel Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, 2 GB Ram, 2 X 80 GB with Raid 1
3x DB servers: Intel Dual Xeon 2.8 GHz, 8 GB Ram, 3 X 73 GB SCSI U320 10K RPM with Raid 5
1x DB server: Dual P4
2x Load balancers: Dual P4 3.0 ghz, 1gb Ram

Apache/Linux
PHP 4.4.1
MySQL 4.0.24

went from dual xeon 2.8ghz with 2 gig of ram and minumum load of 50 to

dual opteron 264 with 2gig of ram to a load average of 2.

I wanted to go Opterons when we first got this server, but found a great deal on Dual Xeons. It's been running great, but I've been semi-seriously thinking about finding cheap(er) dual opterons.

your sites will be faster on opterons, garanteed.

our biggest problem has always been disk speed, not proc. speed. But I definitely agree Opterons are much better.

You get what you pay for. :)

You're certainly entitled to your opinion, but it's not particularly relevant to our needs.

But if that were always true, then that would mean that IPB would be better than vB, which we all know is bull.:bunny:

some great info ... I've been using DUAL XEON servers for quite some time ...
It may be time to make a switch. (time to do some research) :up:

(subscribes to thread)

I'm switching this weekend from Xeons to Opterons. The performance increase will be well worth it.

I'm also switching to RAID, so I can sleep better at night regarding drive failure.

Some of our machines are twin opterons and during a test period eariler in the year we had 2 Opterons spare which we used for HTML serving and they did a great job. We are now looking at bring in a number of twin Opterons for both HTML and mySQL serving as they do seem to be a much better buy.

I have a question for those of you with dual Opteron servers or who are getting them: what providers are you using? How has the service been?

I'm just about to upgrade to Dual Opteron from a Single CPU (don't laugh). The current box is sweating a bit under the load at the moment, so its an upgrade not before time.

Will let you know the outcome, but I don't know how useful it will be as we're going from a P4 3.4Ghz to a Dual Opteron & gaining another 2GB of Ram at the same time, which everything together equals probably a trippling of resources for VB to gobble up! lol

Where are you guys hosting your Dual Opterons? I'm still using Dual Xeon boxes but Dual Opterons would be peachy.

We are also looking at going the Opteron route for our new DB servers. We have found that the true CPU usage isn't the problem. It's disk IO, we are exploring different types of RAID levels and different interfaces. I'm rather intrigued by Serial Attached Scsi. The price is rather high for 15k 73gb drives, but might be a good fix to our IOwait issues when paired with RAID 10. I just can't trust SATA for mission critical data such as DB servers yet. We might do RAID5 with SATA on our web servers though.


I've found it always best to email perspective hosts, and ask if they can special order certain parts I want in. They might not list them on their site, but most hosts can have things drop shipped.

SATA isn't a problem IMO, as long as you go with a reputable manufacturer - i.e don't use the onboard stuff, as its usually pants (not that any one here would do anyway, I'm sure). Adaptec do some SATA stuff now as well as SCSI. If it were my choice (and not the hosting companies), I may well look seriously into the SATA route. One area you may well loose out on could be SCSI features, although SATA now has NCQ to mention one. Anyway, I wouldn't rule it out quite so fast.

As for above - yeah, it was a question I had when I was trying to determine the reason behind the load. Although the mySQL server gets hit like hell, the load indicator showed it was the CPU which was the limiting factor as the CPU load would normally reach high 90s during really heavy times and then the RAM would get exhausted because it wasn't processing requests quickly enough and then swap file came into use, made everything a million times worse and... well, I'm sure you all know the rest of the story! ;)

To answer the question above - mine is hosted at Positive Internet in the UK (www.positive-internet.com), they aren't cheap, but you do get what you pay for. First class (and I cannot fault them at all) support & assitance. They've gone above and beyond the call of duty so many times I've started handing out medals.

rusko.us gave me a rather decent quote on some opteron machines a ways back. WHT is also a good place to look for specials with opterons, and they do have a host finder thingamajig that allows you to specify opterons in the options, I believe.

We are currently using (2) Dual Xeon Servers. 1 for Web and the other for data base. Both have (2) 73gig 10k SCSI HDs, but not raid. We've been taxing and maxing them for the last few months and use EV1.

Later this month I will be purchasing (not leasing) Opteron 270 powered servers. I'm hopefully going to be contracting the server godfather here sometime soon to have a look and let us know exactly what we need, but no matter what it is going to be Opteron. I've studied them up and down and there is little (if anything) that can dispute the Opterons dominance in the server market over Xeons of today (and especially yesterday). My xeons have performed pretty well but with Opterons prices being cut almost in half and their history of excellent performance over the past few years, there is no question in my mind what we're going to now.

I have also studied up on SATA drives, and while they are fast (especially the raptors) in single user environments, they are still a good ways behind scsi in heavy I/O situations such as data base operations. We're going with a top of the line SCSI RAID card and u320 15k RPM hard drives, most likely running RAID 10 for the database. We'll probably use SATA Raptors for the web server running RAID 1. Both will have 2x Opteron 270 dual cores and plenty of RAM. Still undecided on using a Supermicro or Tyan Thunder mother boards..

We will save a pretty nice chunk of change on monthly hosting expenses going from leased dedicated to COLO'ing. I am in Houston but I can't find a colo facility down here that won't end up nailing us on bandwidth fees so I am thinking we are going to colo at www.dedicatednow.com . They give you 2,000 Gigs a month using a 1u/2u or mini-tower server for $99/mo plus different management plans if you want them to handle that type of thing in house. As we grow, we can keep adding servers as needed. I'm really tired of leasing servers and will be happy to purchase our own where I know the history of the equipment (we've had two hard drives go bad in the last 4 months on the same server) and it doesn't cost us a huge amount of money each month to have really powerful machines. If we want more RAM, we pay once rather than a setup fee and then a monthly.

There's some nice colo places in Texas, though, most are in Dallas.

http://cologuys.com is in Dallas, and has reasonable prices. They host some of the larger webcomics out there.
http://colo4dallas.com/ is very good, but expensive.
http://www.layeredtech.com/ can get you colo at the Savvis datacenter, however, you have to contact them to get a price quote.
http://www.theplanet.com/ also has colo, but same story as LT on pricing.


There's also a lot of companies in the Infomart who offer colo, more than I can list here.

I talked to Layeredtech re: the Savvis data center but they were not very interested in COLO'ing unless you get a 1/2 or full rack, if memory serves. I need 2 max at the moment but will likely be expanding soon.

Thanks for the info

I take that back. We may be moving to one in a few weeks.

I'm going with www.softlayer.com for my Opterons. They're new, but I've talked extensively with them, and I believe they can do the right thing for me. And they're going to be introducing load-balancing options in about 2 weeks.

My board isnt 'huge' but still large enough (800mb db), we've been running dual 246's and "toying" with the idea of upgrading to 275's. Current server built off a Tyan Thunder K8SR (S2881).

Instead of that I might just build a DB server when it comes to upgrade and use top end dual core opterons for that and set up a SCSI RAID the way I really would like to for the DB instead of the SATA RAID that we currently use.

Colo in Michigan with a friend - works out very well. 2 1000mbit bonded and attached to two different switches.

i use my dual opteron 246 with raid and 2gig ram with www.dedicatednow.com , good support.

Please post a list of hosting companies that supply dual core opterons and offer private racks or networks. :) I would be interested.

I'd be interested too, as at least in Germany dual opteron offers seem to be very rare.

tried webhostingtalk.com Erwin?

New thread for this? If so, I'll share all that I have compiled so far.

Please do. :)

As for webhostingtalk - I've gone there, but would like to see if anyone has got a definitive list.

I still will never understand why people waste money on dedicated servers. We have purchased about ten servers in the past and have had them co-located with Defender Hosting (.com) for the past three years. Never had any problems.

Our most recent server purchase:

Dual AMD Opteron 270, Dual Core
8 GB RAM
4x 74 GB 15,000 RPM – RAID 10
Fedora Core 4 Linux, 64-bit

It's BLAZING fast.

Softlayer is run by a large contingent of The Planet people who left to start up their own company - Great guys, I think.

Just finished building a new db server for a project. Has 8 dual core opterons for a total of 16 processors in the one box. Should crank out enough for our needs for the next couple years.

When you colo, what happens if a piece of hardware fails? (hard drive, ram, or god forbid the motherboard)? Wouldn't you then have immense downtime unless you have redundancy? So that then doubles the hardware you will need and the rack space.

If you're listing datacenters / hosting companies and are happy and have been with them for a while, please add them to this big forum hosting / datacenter thread

-vissa

I'm a little late to the party, but I've got a dedicated DB box with dual opterons and can't rave enough about the performance, after putting up with Xeons for a log time - I can hardly believe it. 2.5M posts, 600 users online now, and server load is .04 (as in, not even .1). Hosted at liquidweb.com (though I cannot wholeheartedly recommend them). I'll be colocating two of these puppies in Dallas soon.