Artur Hefczyc

I always wondered if the multi-core or hyper-threading technology is only marketing thing or ot really gives you a significant performance boost in your system. I mean home based system not in enterprise servers. Are all those core really used and given that you have a shared memory and a shared hard drive can you make use of all those cores.

I had to replace my old server which hosts all tigase.org services (websites, e-mails, Jabber/XMPP, SVN, project tracking....) as it couldn't cope with the load and it had too little memory. And as usually upgrading memory in old systems is much more expensive that buying memory for the new machine.

At the end I decided to build a new server from scratch. 64bits, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD in Raid-1 and a CPU. I wasn't really convinced for multi-core so I thought for a moment about buying multi-cpu motherboard. I coulnd't, however find any non-Xeon multi CPU motherboards and XEON motherboards were quite expensive, don't even mention about CPUs.

Ok, I turned back to multi-core. Quad core was not so much more than Dual then I gave it a go.

Gentoo installation was quite smooth and suprisingly fast. Even though I've put -j5 option just in case to the make command didn't believe too much in it.

The compilation was so quick so I wanted to see what is the real gain from the multicore system. The best test as usual is the kernel compilation. I ran compilation with a single thread and then two threads, three, four, five and six. Below are results:

 Hm, colcusion: Number of CPU cores does really matter. Even in home based systems...