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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Quick question.
On Tue, 3 Aug 2004, Alexei Roudnev wrote: It is not mad idea - 2 CPU servers are not sugnificantly more expansive as 1CPU (and notice, we count P-IV MMultiThread as 2 CPU)Well, you have to compare like for like, so system with multiple CPUs versus exact system without. No diffference in cost, other than for the CPUs. And if you want reliability, you're not going to be buying your machines from the nearest Lidl (unless your application is engineered to take advantage of dozens of cheap throwaway PCs). but increases system redundancy to the run-away processes. Of course, it is not hardware redundancy, but it REALLY works.Not really.. this is a resource exhaustion problem, and you can not cure this, given buggy apps, by throwing more CPUs at it. Let's say you have some multi-process or multi-threaded application which regularly spawns/forks new processes/threads, but it is buggy and prone to having individual processes/threads spin. So one spins, but you still have plenty of CPU time left cause you have two CPUs. Another spins, and the machine starts to crawl. So you solve this problem by upgrading to a quad-SMP machine. And guess what happens? :) Sure, there are some application bugs you can mask a wee bit with SMP, but it's not much cop, its not a solution, and you need an infinite-SMP machine to guarantee that a bad application can never hog all CPU time. What you really want is a good OS with: - a good scheduler (to prevent spinning tasks from starving other tasks) - ability to set resource limits, ie per-task and/or per-user (if your apps run under dedicated user accounts) limits on cpu time, resident memory, etc.. Both of these will allow you to constrain the impact bad tasks can have on the system, whether your machine is 1, 2, ... or n CPUs. The real solution though is to fix the buggy application. regards, -- Paul Jakma [email protected] [email protected] Key ID: 64A2FF6A Fortune: The life which is unexamined is not worth living. -- Plato
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