Is this possible?

[Dave Stevens]

Quoting rikona <rikona at sonic.net>:

> Hello Dave,
>
> Monday, October 3, 2016, 3:35:52 PM, Dave wrote:
>
>> Quoting rikona <rikona at sonic.net>:
>
>>> Hello Dave,
>>>
>>> Monday, October 3, 2016, 11:57:28 AM, Dave wrote:
>>>
>>>> Quoting rikona <rikona at sonic.net>:
>>>
>>>>> Hello Dave,
>>>>>
>>>>> Monday, October 3, 2016, 9:13:33 AM, Dave wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Quoting Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com>:
>>>>>
>>>>>>> On 3 October 2016 at 06:57, rikona <rikona at sonic.net> wrote:
>>>>>>>> AMD 4or6 core processor [have a 6 core]
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Why?
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> Apart from at the very low end, Intel is faster than AMD and has been
>>>>>>> since the Core 2 Duo range.
>>>>>
>>>>>> Top on my AMD box shows 92% idle, can Intel wait faster?
>>>>>
>>>>> You bring up an interesting point. My large data runs, with many disk
>>>>> accesses, might actually be IO bound, so processor speed may not be
>>>>> the most important factor.
>>>>>
>>>>> If I put the data on SSDs, though, will that very expensive storage
>>>>> have a short life because of the VERY intensive data access required?
>>>>>
>>>>> --
>>>>>
>>>>>  rikona
>>>
>>>> I think you'd need to profile your usage. When you are running your
>>>> i/o bound processes, what does top show? or sar? iotop?
>>>
>>> Just ran a small test on my old box - very interesting result.
>>> Definitely IO bound. iotop gives me 4-6 M/s, sometimes 99.99%. CPU
>>> mostly around 20-30%, with some jumps to 70-80% or so. 8G mem full.
>>> Swap about half full [but lots of pgms running]. 2 cores, one core
>>> often gets very near/at max, when CPU is high, but usually sits at
>>> about 60-70% visually [using htop].
>>>
>>> I didn't think of this until your note, but looks important. Thanks!
>
>> ok so the swapping says you're running out of RAM so add RAM and see.
>
> Doubled mem to 16G - the max for this box. Didn't change the numbers
> much. The data job took about all the mem after a short while. Swap is
> different - I didn't have a couple of dozen pgms open as I did before,
> and didn't have a history of going between them for many hours, so
> swap was not used very much. There are a few different tasks
> associated with the data job that run alternately. In this test the
> core that is maxed out occasionally changes back and forth between the
> 2 cores. Didn't see that earlier...
>
> If you have one, I'd like an opinion re SSD life when very heavily
> used - this might be a good thing for me if it works without resulting
> in short-life disks.
>
> Appreciate your help...
>
> --
>
>  rikona

warning - advice I haven't tested coming

there's an archived discussion at stackexchange here:

http://superuser.com/questions/51724/should-i-keep-my-swap-file-on-an-ssd-drive

where an answer, the one with 61 points, seems to be from and about  
Microsoft Windows and they say they see a 40:1 ratio between reads and  
writes. I think the wear and tear is mostly from writing. So it seems  
the swap file could usefully live there. Also the swap file is teeny  
compared to the main data store, so even a small SSD would do for that  
purpose.

Certainly I have had a very positive (day and night) experience in  
upgrading my primary drive (/dev/sda) to SSD. Basically extended the  
useful lifetime of the system for another two years. Then something  
else broke, but that's always the way, eliminate one bottleneck and  
find another later.

D


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