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GS160 performance

On paper, the switch from the six AlphaServer GS140s to the two GS160s should have given us approximately 50% improvement in MIPS. Additionally, the GS160s have significantly more memory that the GS140s. Both of these things should be great for a performance boost because with over 4000 users normally logged into the front ends sucking up all the memory, and ad-hoc batch queries bottlenecking the back end CPUs, the GS160s are just what the doctor ordered.

Today, it appears that we have a significant performance increase from prior to the weekend. Normally the back end machines approach 100% CPU, and with the new machines, we are seeing approximately 50% to 60%. And the front ends, which have been starved of memory for so long, now have gigabytes assigned to the XFC. Gigabytes.