New server advice - quad core any special settings needed?

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2007, Krsnendu dasa wrote:

> AMD64 x2 6000
> Intel Duo Quad 6600
> 
> It seems that the Intel would be better due to quad core and faster speed.

While I presume four cores is better than two, I really don't know which
will work out better.

> Both systems would use 4 GB DDR2 800 RAM and 4 SATAII 16MBcache 7200rpm
> 320GB HDDs. (We were thinking Linux software RAID 10 or 01 would be best.)

http://www.miracleas.com/BAARF/RAID5_versus_RAID10.txt

"Performance-wise both RAID01 and RAID10 are functionally equivalent.  The
difference comes in during recovery where RAID01 suffers from some of the
same problems I will describe affecting RAID5 while RAID10 does not."

> Is the quad core the best choice? Are there any special settings needed to
> get he maximum performance out of it?

64-bit edubuntu should probably give you better performance, but if you
need flash and java, you're probably better off using 32-bit with the
server kernel to give you use of the full available RAM.

Gavin