Intel vs AMD

imgmoney

Hi All,

I tested my Magento website on an AMD server and it performs well. I believe the performance depends on the IOPS as I see a huge gain when using HDD and NVMe.

I am using LiteSpeed, PHP 7.4, MySQL 8, Redis

I want to know whether the Processor matters or only the cores in them?

Which is better?

AMD EPYC™ 7502P 32-Core "Rome" (Zen2)
128 GB DDR4 ECC RAM

Intel® Xeon® W-2295 18-Core Cascade-Lake W
128 GB DDR4 ECC RAM

AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16 Cores (Zen3)
128 GB DDR4 ECC RAM

JasonM

depends upon usability.
more core doesn't mean a fast processing.
high clock speed means fast processing of single-threaded operations.

For some use-case you require more cores, like 32 cores having 2.0 GHz clock speed.
For some use-case you require less cores, like 4 or 8 having 3.7 or 4GHz clock speed.

For hosting a site which includes server, OS, database one can allot 1 or 2 cores.
For CMS like Magento or WP, again 1 or 2 cores.
Litespeed is quite faster than apache and ngnix. It can compensate a bit for lower clock speed CPU.

NVMe ssd makes a huge difference in I/O read-write of databases, etc. Sites do load fast on NVMe over HDD as reading operations are quick!

I'll choose Ryzen 9 having 3.4 GHz 16 core over Intel EW2295 with 3.0 GHz speed and Epyc with 2.7 GHz only!

webcraft

I consider the last two (Xeon and Ryzen 9) as pretty much comparable. Would go for the cheaper option of both unless you have a highly specialized application (which Magento is not).

momkin

Ryzen combined with NVME disks will make your sites fly

jsg

@imgmoney

How many tens of thousands of requests per second are we talking about? Or put differently, the question whether 40 ton truck model A or model B can transport 25 tons faster is utterly irrelevant when all one actually needs is to haul 2 six packs and 2 pizzas back home.

imgmoney

Earlier I have a complex architecture of my site. Our site was super fast when I am using a single server. But when I move to a multi-server concept the speed goes down.

I discovered that LAN 1gbps is a bottleneck as I see DB is pushing lots of GB over the LAN. This is my earlier infra

3 Web Servers (Nginx and PHP)
3 DB Node (Write, Read and Read)
1 Server for (1 ProxSQL splitting read/write, Redis)
1 Server for (HAProxy Loadbalance, Varnish and ElasticSearch)

And all these servers are connected in 10G LAN, I see the usage is approx 900MBps all the time. Also, we used GlusterFS over NFS as NFS is a bottleneck for PHP. I learned lots of stuff to make the site super fast. But these are not within the budget.

This is the test architecture I created and I find it is very effective. As of now the site is not live, but we process lots of data from API as our site is 90% autopilot. Since the above setup cost me 1000 euro/ month I decided to cancel till we go live.

Now I am planning to switch to 1 server at the start and planning to use LiteSpeed with LiteMage, I believe it will reduce most of the load. Also as soon we start receiving more traffic I am planning to expand slowly one by one.

Will it be a good idea to have one big server rather than having multiple?

I am also planning to go with "AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16 Cores (Zen3)" only. I also tested the

AMD EPYC™ 7502P 32-Core "Rome" (Zen2) with the same ideal config, but the website loads slower in this than the Ryzen 9. Not sure why or my findings are wrong.

The only thing I have not tested is Intel. I do hear from most people Intel is best, but have not tested. That is the reason I am asking over here. Do Intel do make difference in this stack

LiteSpeed + PHP + ElasticSearch + MySQL + Redis

Regarding the APP, we will receive request from the big website about the stock status, price changes, new products and order info. So it will be like 10000s of request every second via API and it hit the DB. All those websites are a marketplace and below Alexa of 3000.

Final question

1) AMD Ryzen 9 5950X 16 Cores, is this a good choice over the other two as this is cheaper than the other?

2) Planning to use 2x NVMe, and RAID1 as a choice. Should I consider RAID10?

Do increase the Storage speed will keep increasing the performance or at one time it stops?

Example: 2xNVMe at RAID1 can do 2GB write speed. And If I do 4xNVMe at RAID10 can do 4GB write speed. Does this reduce the load and improve speed? or it doesn't matter?

jsg

@imgmoney

Please do not get me wrong but I see neither a sensible concept nor a professional but someone who seems to think that somehow mixing the "best ingredients" (largely based on, frankly marketing "reputation" and "the top 5 xyz [processors, http servers, etc]" BS creates a "high end" solution.

Example hint: 'Raid 1 vs Raid 10 NVMes" may, at best, double throughput - designing a professional DB and cache configuration can easily increase throughput by 10 (and more).

Example hint nr. 2: What is the best processor (and memory!) for a DB may well not be the best processor for serving content.

Plus there are of course other questions like e.g. availability and related sub-questions like e.g. which parts need to be redundant, where your audience is located, etc.

The best advice I can provide is that you should get the help of a real professional.

momkin

Also as a side note , no matter what specs you have , you need to optimize your OS and your setup to its max capacity , otherwise it won't matter , even if you have high end machine!

jar

AMD Phenom + memcached + varnish reverse proxied to Nginx reverse proxied to Apache on CentOS 5 with dual SAS disks in RAID1. That’s the fastest config for maximum performance.

chihcherng

Compared with memory and storage, the CPU is seldom the bottleneck of modern computer systems. I would choose larger memory + cheaper CPU over lesser memory + faster CPU.

jsg

@jar said:
AMD Phenom + memcached + varnish reverse proxied to Nginx reverse proxied to Apache on CentOS 5 with dual SAS disks in RAID1. That’s the fastest config for maximum performance.

But the Phenom must be overclocked and the cache must be on a fast SD-card!