re Dual Processor vs. Single Processor
- From: "Craft, Steve" <SCraft@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "'[ISAserver.org Discussion List]'" <isalist@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 08:54:38 -0500
I have some doubts about the performance boost an extra processor might give
to ISA. But there might be some indirect benefit in that Win2K is much
smoother with two processors, so that will leave more "headroom" for ISA
processes.
In Win2K, all processing is symmetrical, so every multi-threaded processes
uses both processors; you can't necessarily lock a single multi-threaded
process to an individual CPU, since they decide which one is least busy and
share the load internally. But with something single-threaded (like any of
the VB desktop apps out there for example, or most games), only one CPU will
run the app at a time and it will stay locked on that app.
So the real question is, out of the 3-4 services (and device drivers?) that
make up ISA, which ones are truly multi-threaded and SMP aware?
I think RAM is more of an issue, in my limited experience when I doubled the
RAM everything got snappier. I have done a lot of stuff on double-CPUs but
not with ISA (yet).
Licensing I don't know about.
----------------------
I'm about to purchase hardware to host an ISA server.
I will be purchasing the single-processor license.
If I get a dual-processor machine:
1) will the single-processor license work okay (does it allow there to be
two processors)?
2) will the second processor give me any performance boost?
I'm thinking that the second processor might still be able to handle
non-ISA related tasks, like network traffic, while the ISA specific
processor (whichever ISA thinks that is...?) deals with ISA related task,
like firewall processing and cache processing.
Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this.
ToddC
toddc@xxxxxxxxx
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