Ny CPU health testing software

I'd be inclined to choose the 2x nelaheim processors configuration. You've said you'll be running a lot of websites which can translate to a lot of web application threads, and 2 4 core processors translates to a lot of multi-tasking ability, and the throughput on the newest intel processors is much improved over their older processors. You should also see some very good memory performance from that architecture too, which should help with serving website content nice and quickly.

Yes, database operations usually have to be written to the disk before they return as successful. This is a very good thing, as a program shouldn't continue before knowing if the operation was done properly. If you would parallelize your test program, you would likely find that your loops have less impact on the runtime, as the loops could be run while other threads are waiting for their IO operations to finish.

Also, while certainly modern CPU's are the most unlike candidates for being the bottleneck in a database, this is not generally true: Depending on your application and it's DB queries, they can be extremely taxing on the CPU, leaving the disk subsystem idling while the CPU is running at 100%.