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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Posts
    367

    Will an SSD drive help even if there's no iowait problem?

    Hello,

    My server has load averages of 2 to 3 and MySQL and PHP-FPM are consuming most of the resources.

    top - 23:44:12 up 13 days, 21:50, 1 user, load average: 3.00, 2.73, 2.66
    Tasks: 211 total, 5 running, 206 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
    Cpu(s): 39.6%us, 1.2%sy, 0.0%ni, 59.0%id, 0.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si, 0.0%st
    Mem: 8165800k total, 8068172k used, 97628k free, 990932k buffers
    Swap: 2096472k total, 200464k used, 1896008k free, 5080492k cached

    PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
    29452 nginx 25 0 729m 232m 215m R 99.8 2.9 4452:29 php-fpm
    19253 mysql 10 -5 1365m 695m 4584 S 31.6 8.7 2528:27 mysqld

    I'm using a single SATA drive and Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz

    I don't have any iowait problems. My question is will an SSD drive or even an SAS drive help in this case to lower the load?

  2. #2
    There is nothing wrong with that load average.

    I doubt a faster disk setup will make much difference. php-fpm seems to be using up a full thread though. I assume you're running multiple instances?
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  3. #3
    Join Date
    Sep 2008
    Location
    Dallas, TX
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    4,568
    Nope, replacing it with a SSD or SAS drive will do you no good for now at least. However you scare me when running just one drive, you may want to consider getting two SATAs at the least and using RAID 1, even if it will not help you now I'd hate to have you lose all your data because your HDD died.
    Jacob Wall

  4. #4
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
    Posts
    1,767
    No, but if you want to speed things up a bit (assuming you're running a web server), try 1H Hive and Varnish. It looks like CPU is your bottleneck so a cache would definitely help.

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
    Posts
    367
    Quote Originally Posted by SeedBit View Post
    I assume you're running multiple instances?
    only 1 php, php 5.3.6 if that's what you mean

    Quote Originally Posted by Jacob Wall View Post
    you may want to consider getting two SATAs at the least and using RAID 1, even if it will not help you now I'd hate to have you lose all your data because your HDD died.
    Thanks. I have two offsite backups just in case.

    Quote Originally Posted by jtodd View Post
    It looks like CPU is your bottleneck so a cache would definitely help.
    would a xeon help?

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by kafloofen View Post
    only 1 php, php 5.3.6 if that's what you mean
    I mean do you have multiple worker processes running?
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  7. #7
    Join Date
    Jun 2006
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    1,767
    Honestly I would try optimisation first as a load of 3 isn't really that high for an i7 system.

  8. #8
    You look to be at about 40% cpu utilization. As long as this is your peak load level, this is fine. The i/o wait looks like zero, so no, faster disks won't help you. You also don't need more ram, 5gb out of 8gb of your ram is being used for disk caching, so you have plenty of ram.

    If you want things to go faster, you'll need to optimize your application or get a more powerful cpu. You've already got a really powerful cpu, but Dual E5645 xeons would be faster (12 cores @ 2.4ghz, vs 4 cores at 2.8ghz)
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  9. #9
    Join Date
    Jun 2005
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    367
    Quote Originally Posted by funkywizard View Post
    Dual E5645 xeons would be faster (12 cores @ 2.4ghz, vs 4 cores at 2.8ghz)
    Is the i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz really 4 cores? Why do I see 8 when I do

    cat /proc/cpuinfo

  10. #10
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    San Francisco
    Posts
    7,325
    Quote Originally Posted by kafloofen View Post
    Is the i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80GHz really 4 cores? Why do I see 8 when I do

    cat /proc/cpuinfo
    It has four physical cores but with HT, you have 8 logical cores which is what cpuinfo shows.

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Mar 2002
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    I believe as long as the load is below the number of CPU/cores, its ok.
    With php-fpm you should run at least one for each core, so 8.
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  12. #12
    Join Date
    Jan 2010
    Location
    so cal
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    In this situation, litespeed nor varnish will help much. The best thing to do is upgrade your cpu or find the root of the cause and fix any programming bottlenecks.

    Also, can you post your cat /proc/cpuinfo

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