I was talking about a desktop system ☺ Servers vary, depending on what you’re doing. For one of the current clusters I’m putting together now (to host ~125 File Server VMs) our bottleneck is actually CPU (which is a bit strange, but there you go)
Cheers Ken From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of David Connors Sent: Thursday, 15 July 2010 6:49 AM To: ozDotNet Subject: Re: [OT] My Win 7 PC too slow..disk queue time issue solved On 15 July 2010 00:03, Ken Schaefer <k...@adopenstatic.com<mailto:k...@adopenstatic.com>> wrote: These days, disk I/O is the #1 bottleneck in most systems (take it from an infrastructure person that has to worry about such things). Really? That is the opposite of my experience, especially with virtualisation. We use up all of the RAM in our virtualisation hosts with CPU doing SFA and disk pretty close to idle (except during a cold boot of the host parition, which is ugly :) Back in the day you used to walk through places like Web Central (when they used el cheapo 'rack mount' servers with IDE disks) and the only way you could tell the difference between the power and HDD LED was one was red and one was green (i,e. the HDD was hit so hard it was just ON, not flickering). These days you don't see that any more. The launch of the Cisco UCS EM servers caused a stir because they let you bung 384 meg in a 2U server. A 2U server with 48 DIMM slots is something to see! Even aside from running VS, regular tasks like opening files, or installing patches, or the occasional reboot, are going to be much faster with an SSD. Throwing more RAM at a system will help (by allowing more caching of files). But there is still the penalty of loading that data into RAM in the first place, and every single IOP is going to be hobbled by your spinning platter. Buying more RAM (above whatever commit charge you have) is merely masking the underlying problem. And whilst CPUs have got much more power, and RAM is much more plentiful, disk I/O really has become the #1 bottleneck for desktop systems. Buying huge amounts of RAM is just masking that issue. I put a OCZ SSD in my E6500 a while ago. Disk to disk copies are faster but TBH if I could have my $1000 back and buy 8GB instead of 4GB, I probably would. The main benefit of the SSD for me is the machine is silent and the palm rest does not get as hot as blazes again. David. -- David Connors | da...@codify.com<mailto:da...@codify.com> | www.codify.com<http://www.codify.com> Software Engineer Codify Pty Ltd Phone: +61 (7) 3210 6268 | Facsimile: +61 (7) 3210 6269 | Mobile: +61 417 189 363 V-Card: https://www.codify.com/cards/davidconnors Address Info: https://www.codify.com/contact
