On Mon, 2006-07-31 at 11:30, Arjen van der Meijden wrote: > On 31-7-2006 17:52, Merlin Moncure wrote: > For a database system, however, processors hardly ever are the main > bottleneck, are they? So you should probably go for a set of "fast > processors" from your favorite supplier and focus mainly on lots of > memory and fast disks. Whether that employs Opterons or Xeon Woodcrest > (no other Xeons are up to that competition, imho) doesn't really matter. Just making a quick comment here. While the CPU core itself nowadays certainly is not the most common bottleneck for a fast db server, the ability of the CPU/Memory combo to act as a datapump IS often a limit. In that case, you want to go with whichever setup gives you the fastest access to memory.