Worth $14 difference in price?

[TPerry]

Two servers - identically equipped except for CPU.
#1 has Dual Intel Xeon L5639's
#2 has Dual Intel Xeon L5520's

I know the 5520's are quad core and the 5639's are hex core. Power usage on both are the same (60 watts) and that the 5639 has slightly more L2 cache (.33MB per core).

Main question is - would it be worth $14 a month for the slight performance gains that I'm seeing reported?

 

[p4guru]

yes worth !

there's much more to cpu cores than just pure web performance

admin tasks can be potentially faster i.e. if you use multi-threaded mysql backup tools such as mydumper and/or if you use multi-threaded compression tools like pbzip2 and pigz for compression.

L5639 would in theory be 50% faster than L5520 for such multi-threaded tools/tasks.

 

[Slavik]

It depends how heavy your current loads are. If your not a particularly heavy website, then no.

 

[TPerry]

It depends how heavy your current loads are. If your not a particularly heavy website, then no.

Max has been 1.42 on one of the current ones - average 0.14. I'm thinking about getting one just for general purposes.

 

[TPerry]

yes worth !
there's much more to cpu cores than just pure web performance
admin tasks can be potentially faster i.e. if you use multi-threaded mysql backup tools such as mydumper and/or if you use multi-threaded compression tools like pbzip2 and pigz for compression.
L5639 would in theory be 50% faster than L5520 for such multi-threaded tools/tasks.

Well, considering the low loads now (and in the near future) I wasn't sure if it would be worth it. None of the forums have hardly any activity on them. ServerComplete just started offering them in addition to the 5520's that I have (noticed it when I went to look at getting another 5520 to set up). I'll probably break down and go ahead and get one just for GP.

 

[WSWD]

As Slavik said...it depends. Everybody is all about getting the fastest processors and the most cores and 64GB of RAM for a forum or small website, and you simply just don't need it. You could put most sites on a boneyard Pentium 4 with a couple gigs of RAM, and they'd run just fine. Hell, it wasn't that long ago that hosts were using Pentium 4's and Celerons to host hundreds of websites, and there was never any issue.

It just depends on your usage. If you're maxing out a 4 core processor, then an upgrade to a 6 core, or even a dual processor system is a no-brainer. If you're using 5% of a 4 core processor, then an upgrade to a 6 is just completely unnecessary.

 

[TPerry]

It just depends on your usage. If you're maxing out a 4 core processor, then an upgrade to a 6 core, or even a dual processor system is a no-brainer. If you're using 5% of a 4 core processor, then an upgrade to a 6 is just completely unnecessary.

I'm already on dual L5520's and nowhere NEAR using the full potential. Was mainly curios if $14 was worth the bump up (it's only money and about 1 night out at dinner for me). Actually moving to them will reduce my hosting bill by more than what the increase would be since on one of them I have to get a totally new server (one has the BIOS RAID enabled on it and the drives cannot be moved - the other one is using md raid and can). I don't REALLY need the SSD drives (which I'm paying more for) in that one as for all practical purposes for me the difference is not that noticeable and it will allow me to move from 128GB to 1TB drives which will give me more storage space (which is more important to me than speed right now).

If the forums REALLY take off, I can always consolidate them all onto one kicking server and only increase my monthly outlay by less than $150.

 

[WSWD]

If you're looking for storage space, ask to have a 3 or 4 TB drive put in the server along with the SSDs or such. Shouldn't be that much more a month. They're dirt cheap.

 

[HittingSmoke]

As Slavik said...it depends. Everybody is all about getting the fastest processors and the most cores and 64GB of RAM for a forum or small website, and you simply just don't need it. You could put most sites on a boneyard Pentium 4 with a couple gigs of RAM, and they'd run just fine. Hell, it wasn't that long ago that hosts were using Pentium 4's and Celerons to host hundreds of websites, and there was never any issue.

It just depends on your usage. If you're maxing out a 4 core processor, then an upgrade to a 6 core, or even a dual processor system is a no-brainer. If you're using 5% of a 4 core processor, then an upgrade to a 6 is just completely unnecessary.

I have a low traffic XF forum running on an Intel Atom Z550@2Ghz with 2GB of RAM. Responsiveness is excellent. Rebuilding templates takes ages but the user-facing side of the site runs great.

 

[TPerry]

I have a low traffic XF forum running on an Intel Atom Z550@2Ghz with 2GB of RAM. Responsiveness is excellent. Rebuilding templates takes ages but the user-facing side of the site runs great.

I have a single VERY LOW volume site running on a dual L5639 with 24GB memory... runs very nicely.
I even played with copying the site over to a test VPS I set up on one of the other servers (via Proxmox).. Didn't do to bad (only gave the server 512MB ram burstable to 768MB.