Author: Scott Gasch
Date: 12:06:07 08/20/01
Go up one level in this thread
On August 20, 2001 at 10:58:22, José Carlos wrote: > Sorry for the off-topic, but I think this is interesting for people here, in >order to make decisions. > I've recently bought a Athlon 1.3 (1Gb RAM). I want to create a huge book for >my program. I wanted to install Win2000 Server with SQL Server 2000, but some >friends have told me Win2000-Athlon don't work properly. It's a lot of money, so >I want to be sure. They say that if you run intensive cpu tasks, the system >don't respond for a long time. A few comments... First, why win2k server? win2k pro is a lot less money and almost exactly the same. Does SQL server not run on pro or something? Isn't there a version of MySQL that runs on windows? You know how much money you are talking about for server and msql?!? Next, I can say with some authority that NT works fine on Athlons. We are running winxp on about 20 Athlons in the lab here (in my group at MS). I think your friend is pro intel or anti ms or both. Here is the only thing I will say against AMD: they do not give MS the technical errata for their chips and intel does. I know a guy who actually "discovered" a bug in an Athlon running at a certain speed where it would randomly jump to a kernel mode address and bugcheck the system. It turns out they knew about this already but hadn't bothered to tell anyone. FYI: it's been fixed and it happened only at a "slow" clock speed by today's standards. Finally, win2k server and pro use a different scheduling algorithm for thread dispatching. You will find server is less responsive under heavy stress than pro for a couple of reasons: the quantum is longer on server and there is no "interactive process boost" on server. That means on pro the process owning the window that has user focus is getting scheduled with a longer quantum than others. Since server is designed to be, well, a server, this is not done. Having tested NT under more stress than you can imagine, I'm pretty confident that it handles well under massive load. I'm a bit biased but I'd be surprised if linux did as well. > I'd like to hear opinions and alternative suggestions. It could be worth to >try Linux (they say 'MySQL' is free and works fine), but I'm not used to Linux. >Maybe WinNT works better than Win2000? NT == Win2k == WinXp. Its the same kernel. I'd really really recommend against NT4.0. There are literally tens of thousands of bugs that were corrected in win2k. I'm not kidding. The delta is not as great between 2k and XP... XP has some more efficient algorithms in the kernel for memory management and synchronization to look forward to though. I'm surprised 4.0 was as stable as it was. 2k is a good choice I think. Or get XP client when it releases later this fall. Or get linux or freebsd or whatever... I've had a lot of good luck with both. Plus you can't beat the price... Good luck, Scott > This is not a commecial post at all. I just need advice. > BTW, apart from this database task, I'll use the computer mostly for chess... >So not that OT ;) > > José C.
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