[QUOTE=Mark Rose;380420]Have you looked at disabling any unnecessary background services to free up memory?[/QUOTE]

In fact, I did just a little bit earlier. SQL integration services got installed and was running, taking a little bit of RAM, so I stopped that. Ditto on the DFS service since there isn't any DFS setup (and it had a surprising amount of page faults since the server started, but probably just because it's happy to give up any physical RAM it has).

Other than that the system is pretty well minimized. A lot of other stuff is already stopped like the HP management software. It's been well squeezed by this point.

[QUOTE]Performance can be hit a bit since it's doing some disk I/O (well, a lot of disk I/O on large indices).[/QUOTE]
Would using enterprise-quality SSD drives improve anything?

[url]http://www.mersenne.org/report_top_500/[/url] seems without refresh
[url]http://www.mersenne.org/primenet/[/url] similarly old
[url]http://www.mersenne.org/account/default.php?details=1[/url] totals also stale

[QUOTE=snme2pm1;380436][url]http://www.mersenne.org/report_top_500/[/url] seems without refresh
[url]http://www.mersenne.org/primenet/[/url] similarly old
[url]http://www.mersenne.org/account/default.php?details=1[/url] totals also stale[/QUOTE]

It should be updated now. Maybe it's when I restarted SQL on there after adjusting it's memory settings, but the next few times that job ran it had an error. The last hourly run kicked off okay though, so it's all good.

[QUOTE=Xyzzy;380431]Would using enterprise-quality SSD drives improve anything?[/QUOTE]

SSD drives are *always* a good thing. That said, they're also expensive, especially enterprise level.

Thankfully for all but the busiest systems you can get "good enough" I/O with a sufficient RAID of spinners.

On the desktop level especially, SSD is my #1 go-to for increasing performance. I just haven't had too many good business cases with the stuff I work with to justify SSDs on the servers. Our DB's tend to be small enough and we have tons of GB of RAM on the cluster nodes that eventually the whole DBs are cached in RAM essentially, and they're typically more read-heavy than write-heavy.

Someday I'll have a blast configuring a SQL server with heavy write requirements and I'll have a budget to match. Until then, storage arrays of 12+ SAS 6Gb 15K disks will have to do. :yucky:

[QUOTE=Madpoo;380442]Until then, storage arrays of 12+ SAS 6Gb 15K disks will have to do. :yucky:[/QUOTE]

oh dear god why

[QUOTE=TheMawn;380477]oh dear god why[/QUOTE]

Because if you get bored you can yell at it:

[YOUTUBE]tDacjrSCeq4[/YOUTUBE]

ROFLMFAO! :smile:

Many years ago I used to do the "Wabbit Twist". This was way back when SCSI was king, and Amiga was pretty cool.

A harddrive would fail to spin up (because of stiction) and because of ineratia giving a strong rotational impulse around the spindal might unstick it. For a very little while...

Edit: Oh, shite... Sorry. In my hast I edited your message, rather than posting my own. I'm currently using Firefox because Chrome has decided to randomly crash, but only the latter can view YouTube videos without installing Flash.

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;380482]Because if you get bored you can yell at it...[/QUOTE]

I only yell at them *after* they fail, so... I think I'm okay. :smile:

[QUOTE=Mark Rose;380482]A harddrive would fail to spin up (because of stiction) and because of ineratia giving a strong rotational impulse around the spindal might unstick it. For a very little while...[/QUOTE]

Been there, done that. It's also fun to show someone who doesn't know a thing about hard drives (or physics in general?) the effect of holding a drive in their hand that you just removed from a running system. They're usually surprised by the strong gyroscopic effect. I guess I probably was too the very first time.

Although, it's more fun with the larger 3.5" drives at 15K... just not the same as a 2.5" drive.

[QUOTE=TheMawn;380477]oh dear god why[/QUOTE]

Spinning disks are still *VERY* common in datacenters, for better or worse. It's cost versus capacity, pure and simple.

On my work trip this past week, we were moving into a brand new facility so I did a little tour around the floor to see who else had moved in and what kind of kit they run... and let's face it, for the larger customers (the ones who rent cages, not just cabinets), most of the rack space is acres and acres of platters in SANs.

I chatted up another customer who just moved a couple dozen cabinets over from the closing location... works for a major cable TV company and we're talking about... I dunno... a LOT, petabytes of space to store pre and post edited shows that get sent over the Internet to the cable cos for distribution (yeah, I know, I thought it was all done with satellite tech, but not so much anymore. And all of that is SAN replicated to some other datacenter for redundancy. :)

Everyone knows SSDs are fast but the enterprise models with hundreds of thousands of write cycles are still cost prohibitive. Fortunately costs have been coming way down and new tech is making them more reliable over the long term.

I think it's safe to say we're seeing the transition from horse-and-buggy to motor cars, if I could borrow an overused analogy. :) We're still in the phase where the motor car is out there and people are buying them but there are still far more piles of horse manure in the streets than puddles of leaking oil. :smile:

I predict that very soon, a spinning disk will be about as rare and anachronistic as the horse drawn carriages in Central Park. Maybe 5 more years? In the server world, that is. For desktops, I think SSD's should be mandatory... there's not a whole lot of reason to pick a spinner over an SSD in any laptop/desktop anymore, and the performance is so worth it. Stick with rotating platters if you must for your archive of ripped blu-rays but let's boot and run programs from solid state please. :)

In the meanwhile I could see hybrid drives maybe taking a larger chunk of market share.

The hybrids are good for people who don't know how to manage two drives, since I believe they just cache the most commonly used files to the SSD portion.

I think the SSD sweet spot has moved from 128GB to 256GB. The 64GB ones aren't much cheaper than 128GB at this point. Even the 256GB ones are getting to be a bit more economical. It's all very exciting.

The thing I'm really looking forward to is the m.2 format that plugs directly into the motherboard and draws its (measly) power needs directly from the board. That's two fewer cables :smile:

[wildly offtopic]
SSDs are still too unreliable and have very poor endurance. For short term use, one year or less, after which you intend to throw them away (which is wasteful) then perhaps they have a use but I never use anything for such a short time to justify it. Plus they are harder to securely erase and thus require the use of always on FDE to ensure data security.
[/wildly offtopic]