Should I care about hyper-threading?
 

I'm putting a new machine together (homebrew) whose reason for existence is to be a really fast Apache/PHP/MySQL server. I'm building it around a P4 2.6 GHz, a gig of PC3200 memory, and a Gigabyte GA-8IK100 mobo, which supports the processor's and memory's 800 MHz front-side bus. I've put RedHat 9 on it, and, so far, it's a fast little sucker...

When I did the RedHat install, it thoughtfully created two kernels -- one regular and one with SMP capabilities, in response to the hyper-threading capabilities of the P4. Given its future as a LAMP server, will I benefit much by running hyper-threaded / SMP? I've done some simple comparisons of the two kernels, with and without hyper-threading enabled, and have yet to see any significant speed differences. But what I've done hardly counts as reasonable benchmarking of LAMP performance. Any advice out there? I might just say "why not?" and run under SMP, but I've seen a couple of weird system glitches that may or may not go away with a bit more system twiddling.

Thanks,
Jim Miller

sorry to burst your bubble but as a former red hat user, I have to say that the recompiled and optimized i686 Jamd which is based on red hat 9, totally kills it in the speed department. I bet it would fly on that system.

To learn more about it, click on "why I switched from red hat to jamd" on my guide. Link is below.