[MGSteve]

Originally Posted by The Prohacker

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.

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.