Re: Net work card + CPU load
Hi Michael,
Thank you for your thorough reply. My machine at work do use SCSI drives
(Adaptec with aic7xxx driver). The motherboard has got ICH2 IDE controllers,
with one IDE drive, my /home, and a CD-RW on. I hardly ever do any big
transfers to or from the IDE drive, I have big "data" partition on the one
SCSI drive.
> Yup, pretty much all cards do in the 100mbit realm.
Damn. I got the feeling some of the Intel server cards actually did better
than that, but that might be an illusion.
> You're not going to fill a gbit pipe with an IDE/EIDE/UDMA hard
> drive.
Definitely not, but I'm not just thinking of copying data across. Distcc is
one of my favourite tools - and with a couple of dual Xeon machines standing
around, I've seen my network usage reach the practical limits of the network
card in my machine.
> systems use a different 'front side bus' system called HyperTransport which
> allows for multiple point to point links on the north bridge and between
> the PCI, PCI-X and other peripheral busses or bridges. Giving you a far
> larger aggregate bandwidth than is possible on Intel. They look more like
> a Sun E or V series than they do a PC, really. I could go into *great*
> detail about the differences really,
If you don't mind the typing I would appreciate it.
> but the Opterons are much more suited
> to high end computing than any current Intel platform.
I'm surprised you haven't gotten flamed for this yet, but based on the
"eyeball" benchmarks I've done so far, the Opterons perform better than
anything I've seen.
> Now that said, jsut because you have Gig-E to everything doesn't mean you
> need to fully utilise it at every server port.
I don't think I will, but I'll definitely get close to or go over 100mbit, and
seeing what it's doing to my CPU already (which I have a lot of other work
for as it is), worries me enough already.
Thanks
--
Kind regards
Hans du Plooy
SagacIT
hansdp at sagacit dot com
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