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[abaci64 at gmail.com]

Hi all,
I know that in general Intel Xeon processors are recommended over AMD for FreeSWITCH, my question is if AMD is really bad or just not as good as Intel, I can get now a server with 4x AMD 6174 (48 Core total) for about the same price I would pay for a Dual Xeon 6 Core (12 core total), Should I go for the AMD which will give me 4x the amount of cores or stick to Xeon, my goal is to get the maximum amount of channels/calls  (doing lua IVR with no transcoding) and conferencing.
Any help, feedback, benchmarks or personal experience would be appreciated
Thanks

[mike at jerris.com]

You would have to test to see, most of my experience is a couple chip generations back now but bang for the buck was much better with intel then and we saw many more weird issues on AMD boxes.

On Sunday, February 14, 2016, Abaci B <abaci64@gmail.com (abaci64@gmail.com)> wrote:

[abaci64 at gmail.com]

I remember in the early days of FreeSWITCH it was recommended to turn off hyperthreading as it had a negative impact on FreeSWITCH performace, Can someone confirm if this has changed with newer processors or newer kernel, if hyperthreading boosts performance then I would guess that a 10 core xeon would give me at least as much performace as a 16 core AMD.
Thanks


On Sun, Feb 14, 2016 at 12:52 PM, Michael Jerris <mike@jerris.com (mike@jerris.com)> wrote:

[mike at jerris.com]

Have not tested it lately, but likely still true, in regards to "I guess"... why not just try it and see for sure?

[abaci64 at gmail.com]

I'm debating between a 4x AMD 6276 (64 cores total) and 4x Intel E7-8867L (40 cores/80 threads), I wish I would be able to afford both and see which one (AMD vs Intel) is better... so if I know that hyperthreading is boosting performance I would probably stick to intel as in general it's better and it's more cores.

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 2:48 PM, Michael Jerris <mike@jerris.com (mike@jerris.com)> wrote:

[anthony.minessale at g...]

If you want an opinionated answer to help you decide:

Always use Intel.  AMD is Intel's R&D department.  The performance is better and the hyperthreading on modern Intel is fine.
 


On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 2:01 PM, Abaci B <abaci64@gmail.com (abaci64@gmail.com)> wrote:

[abaci64 at gmail.com]

is the E7-8867L (Westmere / LGA1567 / Apr/3/11) modern/new enough to be considered good for hyperthreading?

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Anthony Minessale <anthony.minessale@gmail.com (anthony.minessale@gmail.com)> wrote:

[mgg at giagnocavo.net]

If you’re actually doing one huge conference so you need all calls into a single FS instance, ignore this message.

I might be a broken record on this topic, but seriously consider running multiple FreeSWITCH instances and setting affinity to specific sockets or even groups of cores. I’d be surprised to hear a quad-socket system is price/perf competitive with multiple smaller boxes.

At a minimum, you want to partition on NUMA nodes, otherwise every single memory access needs to jump through other processors. For instance, if CPU0 wants memory that’s connected to CPU3, it needs to request it via CPU1 then CPU3. This is slow (a single hop introduces a ~40% penalty). After that, anytime threads are writing to the same part of memory, CPUs have to take ownership from each other’s caches. This can be as expensive as going to main memory (thus being as slow as having no cache) and kill perf.

Presumably with enough media load, you’d want to look into how your NIC is delivering packets, and distribute that accordingly.

On Xeon 5500 series (a while ago, on FS 1.2) we didn’t notice any real impact of hyperthreading either way. But keeping FS partitioned on groups of 4 threads (2 cores) seemed to be the best performing option. The increase in stability was very marked (versus one FS process across 2x Xeons, 16 threads).

-Michael

From: freeswitch-users-bounces@lists.freeswitch.org [mailto:freeswitch-users-bounces@lists.freeswitch.org] On Behalf Of Abaci B
Sent: Tuesday, 16 February, 2016 14:14
To: FreeSWITCH Users Help <freeswitch-users@lists.freeswitch.org>
Subject: Re: [Freeswitch-users] AMD

is the E7-8867L (Westmere / LGA1567 / Apr/3/11) modern/new enough to be considered good for hyperthreading?


On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 3:07 PM, Anthony Minessale <anthony.minessale@gmail.com (anthony.minessale@gmail.com)> wrote:

[brian at freeswitch.org]

Early hyper-threading would have been an issue, but newer CPUs seem to do a great job of it.

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 1:48 PM, Michael Jerris <mike@jerris.com (mike@jerris.com)> wrote:

[abaci64 at gmail.com]

Running one huge conference is actually part of the reason that I want to go with a huge box, but your input is actually very informative as I do intend to use multiple instance of freeswitch (using proxmox / lxc) yet still have the ability on occasion to allocate lots of CPU to a single instance.
You're right that multiple smaller machines will probably win in price/performance, colo space is also a factor.
Thanks Anthony and MIchael for all the info. once I have server up and running I will try to test the limits and report back.


On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 3:47 PM, Michael Giagnocavo <mgg@giagnocavo.net (mgg@giagnocavo.net)> wrote: