Which is better for Polling Engine / Database Server

Question

If you were to have a choice of servers for your Main Polling Engine / Database Server which server below would be the best for each instance.

Server 1 - Intel Xeon CPU E5-2660 @ 2.6Ghz with 10 Cores / 20 Logical Processors

Server 2 - Intel Xeon CPU E5-2643 @ 3.3Ghz with 4 Cores / 8 Logical Processors.

Which one would be best used as the Database Server and which one would be best suited to the Main Polling Engine.

I know that none are ideal and I would prefer better, but this is what I have to work with for the time being in a physical environment.

brscott · Answer

Ultimate answer:  It depends, but probably doesn't matter much either way.

Personal opinion:

#1 for the main poller.  Reason:  Solarwinds can really use all of the cores and in an ideal environment to estimate I would do the math as (10x2.6 = 26Ghz) vs (4x3.3 = 13.2Ghz)

#2 for the SQL server.  Reason: I "think" (I'm not the DBA) our SQL license is based on number of cores, so I go with less cores, but faster speeds.  Also I'm not sure SQL server can effectively use a lot of cores, so the math above does not apply.

sja · Answer

1.DB

2.Main Poller

I have SLX+DLX with 3500 nodes that run fine with less “horsepower” but it’s could change from environment to environment...

mesverrum · Answer

I'd probably run the faster system for the DB, SQL does multithreading to some extent but the most painful parts in Orion tend to be when a task tied to a single thread runs long.  The pollers normally run a ton of concurrent instances of their worker processes and would be better suited to the higher processors counts.