[Opensim-users] Hosting a medium-sized grid

[Jeff Kelley]

I'm porting a grid from a home PC to a server.

The grid is 40 regions large, 16 simulators, 5 to 10 avatars.

It runs today on a i7-2700K (8,921 PassMarks), 16Gb home PC.

A quick test on a 16Gb Xeon gives these stats:

top - 17:49:03 up 14 days,  7:04, 19 users,  load average: 0.40, 0.64, 0.77
Tasks: 208 total,   2 running, 206 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  9.8 us,  1.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 88.4 id,  0.2 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st
KiB Mem:  16483288 total, 16185604 used,   297684 free,   456872 buffers
KiB Swap:   523260 total,    29192 used,   494068 free.  4718744 cached Mem

              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:           15G        15G       318M        37M       446M       4.5G
-/+ buffers/cache:        10G       5.2G
Swap:         510M        28M       482M


The grid runs quite well but 16Gb is a little short, so I will go for 
a 24 or 32Gb machine. This is (obviously, or I won't ask here) a 
non-profit project, on a personal budget.

Here is my dilemma : in the target price range, I can have two machines:

- Two Xeon E5530 (7,723 PassMarks), 8 core total, 24Gb, rotating disk
- Single Xeon E3 1225v2 (6,844 PassMarks), 4 core, 32Gb, 3x120Gb SSD

Should I favour CPU over memory? Memory over SSD?

Which one would you pick?



-- Jeff