I apologize for the length of my post.
We recently converted our business system to a product that is licensed by the number of Cores.
We purchased the 2 core license and are currently running it on VMWare. It is quite expensive to move to the next license level.
We are having some pretty significant performance issues.
We have eliminated RAM as a bottleneck, as well as network, database and disk access.
The times we have issues are not always characterized by high CPU usages.
Sometimes the cpu usage is less than 20%, but the CPU Ready is high.
I am pondering the possibility of running it directly on a separate physical server.
Since I am limited to two cores I would select the fastest "Single Thread Performance" cpu I could get, likely 4 cores.
Then I would set the business system up to use 2 cores and allow the OS to consume the other 2.
My logic goes something like this.
Right now the VM is getting two threads or vCPU.
This is really only one pCPU.
Even if I moved it to the same box without hyperthreading it would get 2 full cores instead of 2 vCPU.
But if I pick a chip that is much faster on single thread, I could gain significantly more.
I would also likely have a small gain since I would not be virtualizing it any more.
Our current 6 core cpu gets the following scores according to Passmark.
CPU Mark: 8570
Single Thread Performance: 1403
The 4 core processor I want gets these scores.
CPU Mark: 10231
Single Thread Performance: 2287
Does it make sense to build a server specifically to gain the best Single Thread performance for an application like this?
Are there any cons I need to worry about?
Would a newer OS make a big difference?
The current host server has the following specs:
Proliant DL380 G7
2 Physical CPU's : Intel(R) Xeon(R) X5675 @ 3.07 GHz
6 Cores Each for 24 logical processors (vCPU) total
Hyperthreading is enabled.
144 GB of RAM
Storage is on a newer SAN and I am sure that is not playing a part in our performance issues.
The business system VM is configured with 2 vCPU's and 24 GB of RAM. The OS is Windows Server 2008 R2.
The business system software is optimized to run on 4 – 6 GB of RAM in the app pool in IIS.
I have never seen the VM go above 16 GB in use.
We are also running 3 other VM's on the host.
One is really doing very little right now and will likely be turned off in the very near future. It has 2 vCPU and 8 GB of RAM.
The 2nd is running our MS Sql database. That one has 8 vCPU and 64 GB of RAM.
We had a DBA look at it and he does not feel that it is the cause of our issues, at least not from the database performance side.
The 3rd VM is running our public website. It averages less than 25 percent on CPU. It has 3 vCPU and 16 GB of RAM.
Once again, any help or wisdom you can provide would be awesome and much appreciated.
Thanks!
Best Answer
You are correct in your assumptions. For your particular case stacking Mhz's instead of vCores is a right way to go. Take a look at this processor: (features 4x 3,5-3,7 Ghz physical cores + HT).
However, I cannot see the real issue from what you have described unless you can provide your actual "CPU Ready" value.