GaryK

Hi,

We have just purchased a dual xeon dell poweredge server to do large volumes of number crunching. Now running the bespoke software I wrote talking to a large SQL database it runs like a dog but only shows my app as taking 25% processor load and sql server somewhere between 3-5%, something is wrong here, maybe my code or a problem in one of the stored procs which I can investigate but I need some basic performance testing software which will measure the speed of the Disks (scsi) the I/O subsystem, RAM and processors, done a STFW but havent found anything as yet, anyone recommend anything?

Cheers

Gary

ChrisB

If it's a Windows platform, PerfMon is a free and good place to start using various counters.

GaryK

Chris,

Ah yes good call, I was thinking of something that would stress it, loads of continous I/O that sort of thing just to check everything out.

Cheers

Gary

IWatkins

Hi Gary,

Lots of useful tools here SysInternals.

But just had another thought.

Dual Xeons ? When you bring up Task Manager and look at the Performance tab, does it show two or four distinct processors ?

If four you have HT switched on. In that case a process that is maxed out will use 25% of the total processing ability of the machine (unless of course it has been written to use multi processors). 25% is of course 100% usage of one logical processor.

As for SQL being really low, well, I'm guessing that is just a problem with processing. Could be a slow disk, could be a problem with a stored proc etc. Don't really know enough about SQL to help on that.

Cheers

Ian

GaryK

Ian,

Your a star! That was going to be my next question! I did find a performance bottleneck which has improved things, I think there was basically more traffic between my app. and SQL Server rather than SQL Server doing crunching, its now upto 19/20%. I was wondering why windows thought there were 4 processors instead of 2.

I'm still a little concerned though that the number crunching this box is doing is only marginally quicker than my development box which is a trusty old 1Ghz Athlon 512MB RAM and a 40GB IDE drive, more investigation needed me thinks.

Cheers

Gary

IWatkins

Gary,

Number crunching is my thing as you probably know. If I can be any help just let me know.

One thing I do know. Number crunching in Delphi isn't fast, nor is C++ regardless of compiler optimisations. For proper fast stuff use FORTRAN.

Cheers

Ian