Time for a new CPU, more RAM, or both?

[tucansam]

Dual core Athlon X2 at 1.6Ghz, the 25w low power version, with 8 GB RAM.  Sab is marauding my system (see attached).

 

I'm wondering if a faster (3.xGHz) dual-core, or quad-core would be a good thing.  Or more RAM.  Or both?

 

Would Sab/Unraid benefit more from more cores, faster cores, or more RAM?  This system is about to get mySQL to round out my XBMC backend...

 

Suggestions on upgrades in order of importance welcome.

[Influencer]

You could use a faster CPU but unless you are noticing severe performance issues its not a huge deal. The ram is fine, you've got plenty to spare

[tucansam]

Thanks.  Glad the RAM is OK. 

 

Faster CPU or more cores?  Or both?  Will Sab use multiple cores?  It seems like that's the process that is causing me the most grief.  And yeah, everything is slow.  I clicked on a share in Windows and it took almost 45 seconds before I got a file list (Sab was doing its usual nuke-the-cpu while this was happening).

[DoeBoye]

In case you missed my posts from awhile back. I have a similar low-power athlon, and when the on demand governor is active, my chip is throttled to 800mhz, and performance suffers. I switch to performance governor, and performance issues disappear... Might be same problem with you.

 

For the record, I'm running sabnzb and using mysql backend for XBMC library...

 

See here:

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=22633.0

 

Hope that helps

 

[Influencer]

45 seconds is slow, but how slow depends on the situation. Are you running cache_dirs? Were the disks associated with that share spun down? How big is your collection/used array?

 

Any cpu that is faster will help. Sab will use multiple cores to unrar and to repair with par. Not sure about downloading(but I would imagine so).

 

Honestly I'd check into other things first, maybe try to run a couple controlled tests. My CPU isn't that much faster than yours, its a 2.8Ghz I believe, but when running sab downloading something sab steadily uses 90% of the CPU. It does this and I can still stream 1080p, and navigate everything with no lengthy waits or loading.

 

Check doeboyes suggestion out, your governor may not be allowing your CPU to switch to a more aggressive clock when its needed.

[tucansam]

I'll look into the governor issue, thanks.  Any time I've looked at specs under unraid its reported 1.6Ghz tho.  But I'll check into that further.

 

I'm using cache dirs.  For the past four days, none of my disks have spun down, ever.  I don't know if Sab is keeping them spinning or what.  I have a cache drive and my spin down delay is set at 15 minutes for all member drives.  So theoretically they should be spinning down, but they're not.

 

The share I was trying to work with while Sab was eating my system for lunch had seven top level directories in it, and several hundred thousand files nearing 3TB in many tens of thousands of directories under those seven top level ones, all nested at various levels. 

 

But beyond that, everything else on the system is slow too.  Couch Potato's web interface often simply doesn't load at all (I just stare at a grey background) until I refresh the browser one, two, three times.  Sickbeard always seems to load, interface-wise, but doing stuff in it is slow.  Sab feels like I'm trying to run Windows 3.0 on a 286.  I see the yellow block loading animation on the main download screen a lot.  The main unraid web interface (simple features) is relatively speedy but I definitely notice when Sab is doing something.  Interactively, from a shell prompt, the system is fast.

 

[neilt0]

I run SABnzbd and Sick Beard on my HP Microserver (1.3GHz dual core) without killing it.

 

nzbget uses significantly less resources than SABnzbd, so that's an option. I'm only using SABnzbd at the moment because my ISP has just imposed a quota this month and nzbget doesn't currently support quotas. If/when I move to another ISP in the next few months, I'll switch back to nzbget.

See the link in my sig for some stats on CPU and RAM usage with SABnzbd and nzbget. There's a new easy to install 5.x plugin for nzbget now as well.

 

I use modprobe powernow-k8 in my go script and my MicroServer runs at 800MHz most of the time.

[tucansam]

I appreciate the reply.  I have read your thread with great interest and may give it a shot.  Sab is really the worst part of my otherwise superb unraid system right now, and ever since I installed it, things somewhere have been broken in one way or another.  I can't get it to save downloads where I want, it has a mind of its own.  Perhaps its best if I switch for something better and lighter weight.

 

But just as a point of curiosity, will unraid (and the "usual" add-ons everyone seems to use) benefit from more cores or faster cores?  If you could have four 1GHz cores, or two 3GHz cores, what would be ideal?  And how about L1/L2/L3?  Athlon II X2s, X3s, X4s, and Phenom II X2s, and X4s are cheap enough on Ebay right now that an extra $20 or so could get you more cores, more speed, or more L2/L3.... Just wondering which should be taking priority.