[ftmjr]

We have an installation of Sybase 12.5.4 on a Sun Fire V890 (w/ UltraSPARC IV). In total, there are four physical CPUs. When running prtdiag command, you can see four physical CPUs, but then 8 logical CPUs.

For example...

-bash-3.00$ prtdiag
System Configuration: Sun Microsystems sun4u Sun Fire V890
System clock frequency: 150 MHz
Memory size: 32768 Megabytes

================ CPUs ====================

Run E$ CPU CPU
Brd CPU MHz MB Impl. Mask
--- ----- ---- ---- ------- ----
A 0, 16 1350 16.0 US-IV 3.1
B 1, 17 1350 16.0 US-IV 3.1
A 2, 18 1350 16.0 US-IV 3.1
B 3, 19 1350 16.0 US-IV 3.1
=======================================


Below is the sp_configure output...


1> sp_configure 'number of engines at startup'
2> go

Parameter Name Default Memory Used Config Value Run Value Unit Type
------------------------------ ----------- ----------- ------------ ----------- -------------------- ----------
number of engines at startup 1 0 4 4 number static



With dual-core and/or dual-thread CPUs, can you allocate Sybase 12.5.4 to use them? For example, can we configure the above dataserver configuration to 8 instead of 4?

What are your thoughts?

Thank you.

[pdreyer]

Yes, you can count a core as a CPU.

[pdreyer]

PS. When it comes to threads per core (UltraSPARC T1 processor) you'll be able to see a virtual CPU per core and per thread but maybe keep this in mind

Sun dual-Niagara servers due in 2008
Compared with older-generation UltraSparc IIIi-servers, the first-generation Niagara systems have 14 times the performance

The first-generation eight-core Niagara chips is a 8 core, 1.0 GHz UltraSPARC T1 processor with 4 threads per cores
Giving 32 virtual CPU's

My conclusion: The 32 Virtual CPUs = 14 UltraSparc IIIi CPUs (assuming 1 GHz both cases)

However the below states you can safely run with 24 engines

Easy Tuning for Sybase ASE on the Sun Fire T2000 Server
The recommendation here is that 24 engines be run, leaving 6 engines to the system.