Re: Dual 1.7 GHz Xeon -- slow, interrupts not balance, etc

[Alan Cox]

> I've been trying to figure out why two Dell Precision 530 Workstations
> (dual 1.7 GHZ Intel Xeon) we just purchased running Linux (I installed
> Debian with 2.4.7 and 2.4.8 kernels) are much slower than expected.
> Note that they were just as slow with the vanilla RedHat 7.1
> installation they were shipped with.  Our dual 1 GHz PIII is just as
> fast as they are.   I'm not sure if it's a hardware or kernel

If you look at the figures from the various benchmarking sites that doesnt
sound unexpected. If you can recode your applications (eg if its a complex
analysis problem) to use SSE2 and the like you may well get big speed ups

> hardware.  No SCSI, all IDE.  400 MHz RDRAM, etc.  However, the PIII
> box only has 512MB RAM compared to the 1 GB of RAM the Xeon boxes
> have.

The impact of that depends entirely on your application

> Any ideas why CPU1 isn't getting any interrupts?  Incidentally,
> interrupts appear to be fairly well balanced on our PIII box.

Do the boot messages ay anothing about this ?