While taking advantage of new PC technology, commodity superservers are starting to displace the traditional midrange systems used for mission-critical applications. One major midrange systems vendor estimates that commodity superservers are replacing up to 20 percent of their new purchases. The decision to purchase one of these systems is driven by the need for a specific application. Performance Performance was the biggest advantage that midrange and high-end servers had over traditional PC systems. To achieve the level of performance required of these systems, mu ltiple CPUs are necessary.
Multiprocessing can take several forms.
With SMP, every processor in the system is available to run any process, allowing for more efficient use of the processors. A high-performance commodity superserver is very different from those systems that are dual CPU systems intended for the desktop. While having dual Pentium 133-MHz CPUs will increase performance, they tend to use a shared cache design and aren't fully optimized to take advantage of all the computing power available. Performance increases are not linear with respect to the number of processors added. A four-CPU system is not twice as fast as a dual CPU system, due to other system constraints.