On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 8:34 AM, Joop Gijsbers <jg_dba@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I have a discussion with a colleague, Technical consultant with a > hardware/IBM/AIX background about the benefits of the use of IBM p- series > hardware instead of x86-64 hardware. > > His these is that because of Oracle Licensing RISC based hardware - > especially the IBM hardware - always will be more profitable then a > Linux/ASM architecture on X86-64 hardware. I'm not an in-depth hardware guy either but I just went to the TPC website... and in the TPC-C (clustered and non-clustered) and in every single size category for the TPC-H, the system with the best published price/performance (which includes licensing) is either Itanium or x86[-64]. I'm not saying this closes the case, but to so quickly dismiss the Intel platform is simply ignorant. From his experience he has a " rule of thumb" that there is a maximum of > 250 concurrent " users" on a RISC based CPU and a maximum of 100 concurrent > " users" on a Intel-based CPU. So because of the CPU licenses he argued > that Oracle on Intel-based CPU will mostly more expensive then on RISC-based > CPU, especially in the case of RAC (with EE). In my opinion those "rules of thumb" are completely arbitrary and totally useless. The number of users on a system completely depends on what you're doing. For a decision support or analytical system (I/O driven ad hoc queries) you might be lucky to get 10 concurrent users on a CPU. For a website (80% small reads on the cache) I think you'd get laughed at for only getting 250 concurrent users per CPU. -Jeremy -- Jeremy Schneider Chicago, IL http://www.ardentperf.com/category/technical