Does turning off the virtualization features make your CPU go faster for non-virtualized workloads?

MattSpeller

@creayt I'm going home to benchmark my (comparitively) budget build 8320 / 840pro

I don't think I have the software installed for the RAM drive boost thingy whatever - I should investigate that.

creayt

@creayt I'm going home to benchmark my (comparitively) budget build 8320 / 840pro

I don't think I have the software installed for the RAM drive boost thingy whatever - I should investigate that.

What you want is Samsung Magician:
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/support/downloads.html

It also lets you overprovision the drive while booted into Windows in a few clicks.

To get these ridic numbers I overprovision really hard, above 25%, FYI. Because it uses the system RAM as the cache ( I think you need at least 8 to even enable "rapid mode", but the more you have the better ).

MattSpeller

@creayt sweet, will investigate!

scottalanmiller

Remember that the more RAM that you use as cache, the more data is potentially in flight during a power loss. If you have 128GB of RAM cache for your storage, that could be a tremendous amount of data that never makes it to the disk.

creayt

@scottalanmiller said:

Remember that the more RAM that you use as cache, the more data is potentially in flight during a power loss. If you have 128GB of RAM cache for your storage, that could be a tremendous amount of data that never makes it to the disk.

So would your recommendation be "Storage Spaces aren't fit for production, always, always go hardware RAID if you're running a mission-critical database"?

And if so, given my hardware:
R620
10x 1TB 850 Pro SSDs
2x Xeon E5-2680 octos
256GB DDR 1600 ECC

And my workload:
Single web app that's a hybrid between a personal to do app and a full enterprise project manager
IIS
Java-based app server
MySQL
MongoDB
Node JS

Would your recommendation be to just go OBR10?

scottalanmiller

Yes, OBR10 and hardware RAID would be my recommendation. Even if you sacrifice a little speed, the protection against failure is a bit better. I would sleep better with hardware RAID there.

creayt

@scottalanmiller said:

Yes, OBR10 and hardware RAID would be my recommendation. Even if you sacrifice a little speed, the protection against failure is a bit better. I would sleep better with hardware RAID there.

Do you have any blog posts on what block size settings to use for web app/database mixed-load OBR10s? Or a favorite primer link you hand out to newbs?

scottalanmiller

@creayt said:

@scottalanmiller said:

Yes, OBR10 and hardware RAID would be my recommendation. Even if you sacrifice a little speed, the protection against failure is a bit better. I would sleep better with hardware RAID there.

Do you have any blog posts on what block size settings to use for web app/database mixed-load OBR10s? Or a favorite primer link you hand out to newbs?

No, afraid not.

Reid Cooper

I do not believe that turning off the virtualization capability of the processor via the BIOS will change the performance of the processor. My understanding of that ability to lock that down is simply that it is a security feature or a control feature, not a performance one.

creayt

@Reid-Cooper said:

I do not believe that turning off the virtualization capability of the processor via the BIOS will change the performance of the processor. My understanding of that ability to lock that down is simply that it is a security feature or a control feature, not a performance one.

That's helpful, thanks. I guess I'll leave it on.