Aaron,
> I'm surprised by this thought. I tend to hit CPU bottlenecks more often than
> I/O ones. In most applications, db I/O is a combination of buffer misses and
> logging, which are both reasonably constrained.
Not my experience at all. In fact, the only times I've seen modern platforms
max out the CPU was when:
a) I had bad queries with bad plans, or
b) I had reporting queires that did a lot of calculation for display (think
OLAP).
Otherwise, on the numerous servers I administrate, RAM spikes, and I/O
bottlenecks, but the CPU stays almost flat.
Of course, most of my apps are large databases (i.e. too big for RAM) with a
heavy transaction-processing component.
What kind of applications are you running?
--
-Josh Berkus
Aglio Database Solutions
San Francisco