Recommendations for Bugzilla hardware

[Joel Peshkin]

Eddie Xie wrote:

>Hi, Kevin.  Thanks for your advice, but I think you're
>misunderstanding the situation I'm in.  I'm not installing Bugzilla
>for the first time.  We already have over 100 users and 50,000 bugs.
>I want to migrate it to a larger system, and I wanted to know where to
>direct our investment.
>
>If we could get a dual processor machine with each processor being
>faster than the single processor we have now plus much more RAM plus a
>bigger, faster, RAID system, then I know that the new system would be
>faster, but I also know we'd be spending a lot of money that could
>more usefully be spent elsewhere.  But where should the money be spent?
>I was trying to figure that out.
>
>  
>

We're still benchmarking, but we have found that the CPU load of even 
the most intense operations does not make a dent in a dual-core AMD64, 
4400 (that's 2200 per core with 1Mbyte/cache per core).  There is 
essentially no swapping with 1GB of memory.  Note, here, that EVERYTHING 
(OS, Webserver, Perl, MySQL) is compiled for 64-bit.

The identifiable botlenck is disk IO bandwidth.  Using 2 SATA channels 
to implement a RAID0 (striping) array, the IO bandwidth is still the 
weak link in the chain (though not very weak at all).  It seems that 
responsiveness is still largely a function of the speed of single big 
queries rather than a question of many concurrent operations.

The conclusion I am starting to reach is that the IO bandwidth to your 
MySQL databases is the most critical function.