Neverside

New servers

Hey all!

It's that time of year again...time when I take stock of the business I've done over the summer and realize, hey, it's time to upgrade again.

I just ordered three SiS755 chipset AMD 64 bit motherboards. These are going into some sleek black rackmount cases and will become the new servers (one for webhosting, one for mailserving, and one for redundancy). I've been running older tech for almost a year now (Athlon 2400+) in my home server and decided I need to upgrade to 64-bit and add some redundancy, as I have had a couple of nearly catastrophic crashes (before I got battery backup, but still, better safe than sorry).

Which brings me here. Generally I help more than I have questions, but I'm wondering if anyone can explain to me the need for SSE3, and whether it would be a huge benefit to have newer 64's with this particular instruction set in my servers. The tradeoff is that with the budget I've laid out for new gear, I'd be going either with SSE3-enabled Sempron 64s, or with Athlon 64s that have twice the L2 cache but no SSE3 (and cost a bit more). Right now I'm leaning toward the Athlons, but am curious if anybody here would have a valid reason for me to reconsider.

Keep in mind, if you will, that when these machines are retired this time next year they won't be gaming rigs (hence the SiS755 chipset; my current gaming rig is nForce3) but rather will likely become HTPCs, or media centers if you will.

Currently the server environment will be a 64-bit flavor of Linux; I'm researching SuSE but will go Gentoo if I have to.

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Bmovies are BACK!

Last edited by actionPlant, October 28th, 2005 02:09 AM (Edited 1 times)

I know this is an off topic post, but how can you afford all this? Is this at your home?

Yes, it's at home, and I'm 28 with a decent job. I afford it because I want to. I like the idea of having my own private datacenter.

Back on topic now?

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Bmovies are BACK!

shoot...he gots mad skillz....

so does this mean AP.com will get a boost in speed, or are you saving those for D58?

oh, and as far as i know about SSE3, it enables the hyperthreading to separate instructions between the "two" chips more efficiently. used to be that each chip handled certain bits of the computing process, so if one chip (i know they aren't chips, but it's the easiest thing to refer to them with) was doing something with say, the OS, and a program needed something that one side had, it would be put on hold until the OS was done with it. with SSE3, both sides can handle everything, thus reducing software wait times.

i think thats it...but i don't use PCs, so wtf do i know, rofl

*edited because of initial stupidity, rofl *

Last edited by Enron_Fever, October 28th, 2005 04:16 AM (Edited 3 times)

Actually these will be Athlons, which are made by AMD, not Intel. The Semprons and the newer Athlons have SSE3 support, where the slightly older Athlons (like the Newcastles and Clawhammers) don't.

And I believe you're right, essentially SSE3 helps prevent stalling out of the chip by improving hyperthreading efficiency, I was just wondering if anyone here has experimented or noticed a difference between having and not having it in a Linux environment. I believe I have an Athlon 64 3000+ socket 939 somewhere that has this, I think I'll just order a cheap older Newcastle (2800+ socket 754) and do a side-by-side; with the different socket settings it might be tricky coming up with comparable motherboards but I'll see what I can figure out...

UNLESS someone here already has. Anyone?

EDIT - And enron fever, in response to your question...the current webserver with all of my sites on it will stay up until the new rack is finished, installed, configured, and tested out. Then all the websites will move to one of them as the new webserver, the second will become a mailserver (socketmail running on a dedicated server but integrated with the D58 community - forums, blogs, photo albums, and of course mail). The license I'm buying will also allow me to run mail for other domains on that same mailserver. The third machine will simply sit there as redundant hardware standing by in case one of the other two fails or needs maintenence. I like to tinker on my machines, so I'll need to be able to pull a mirrored hotswap drive from a live server, toss it in the backup server, and patch the ethernet over to work on the primary machine from time to time.

___________________

Bmovies are BACK!

Last edited by actionPlant, October 28th, 2005 04:03 AM (Edited 1 times)

ROFL! oh well i'm an idjit

Unless I am very much mistaken, SSE3 (along with the majority of the SSE instructions) are optimizations for multimedia applications. I don't think it has much to do with hyperthreading at all, although I'll do some more research and get back to you on it. I very much doubt they will make much difference in a server environment. Semprons vs. Athlons? I would say athlon all the way. Semprons just remind me of celerons and well, need I say more. =)

But damn, what does a guy like you need three separate servers for? Geez, that's serious hardware you're packin'!

EDIT: Oops. Appears that I'm wrong. You learn something every day I guess.... But I still have a distaste of semprons. =)

Last edited by dafrabbit, October 28th, 2005 08:35 AM (Edited 2 times)

I have a slightly offtopic question, and I sense I am about to fail to restrain myself from asking. That is, if you don't mind answering actionPlant. Just how fast is your upstream? (I know its good, just curious as to exactly how good.) And no, I am not atempting to suggest anything with that question. Sometimes a question is just that, a question, and nothing more.

Back on topic, have you asked this over at WHT? I think you'd get alot of useful information, seeing as it is a forum dedicated to webhosting. Alot of the people there are quite knowledgeable about such things as this. And more importantly, a large chunk of the knowledgeable are willing to share their knowledge.

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dafrabbit, you didn't specify...what were you wrong about? Just curious what you found.

samurai_zero, thanks for the link! I've never been over there before and intend to make good use of their knowledge. Awesome, man. As for upstream...honestly it's nowhere near as fast as I'd like. I'm in the middle of freaking North Dakota, and without paying a ridiculous amount for T1 ($400 install + $400/month) the best I can get is 4Mbdown/1Mbup for about $80/month (the price includes extras like a static IP and whatnot). I'd like to see Verizon's FiOS service come to my area, I could get like four times the upload speed for half the price I'm paying now.

However, I have absolutely no caps on bandwidth, no monthly limit whatsoever, so I guess I can't complain TOO badly. It's a tradeoff.

Once I'm making enough of a profit to justify T1 I'll definitely go that route (some people would say it's less bandwidth, but in reality it would be slightly faster upload, guaranteed speed, and much lower latency), as it stands right now, monthly income from hosting for friends and a couple local businesses pays for the current connection. My philosophy isn't to make a huge profit, it's just to work hard enough to make all this stuff pay for itself...I don't like having gear and connections that can't pull their own weight.

___________________

Bmovies are BACK!

Last edited by actionPlant, October 28th, 2005 09:35 PM (Edited 1 times)

Its a link that all those concerned with webhosting ought to have. I'm just glad to spread the love.

Originally posted by actionPlant:

I'm in the middle of freaking North Dakota, and without paying a ridiculous amount for T1 ($400 install + $400/month) the best I can get is 4Mbdown/1Mbup for about $80/month (the price includes extras like a static IP and whatnot). I'd like to see Verizon's FiOS service come to my area, I could get like four times the upload speed for half the price I'm paying now.

In till recently, when due to moving I had to make the switch to cable, I had verizons 3Mbdown/768Kbup - which did wonders to my torrent ratios, and wasn't too bad for serving up webpages from my closet. In fact, it was perfect for that.

Originally posted by actionPlant:

I'd like to see Verizon's FiOS service come to my area, I could get like four times the upload speed for half the price I'm paying now.

I too am dreaming of the day FiOS comes to my area. What is interesting though is that, unknown to the world, Verizon is offering 3Mbdown/3Mbup where I used to live. Kennewick, Wa. Of course, to get this awesome service for the amazingly cheap price of $40/month, you have to live in this certain apartment complex. And only there. The only reason I can figure for this is that the apartment building is located right next to the main Verizon datacenter here in the Tri-Cities. Or maybe the complex owner has friends in Verizon.

Anyhow, goodluck with your quest for knowledge.

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