coping with summer traffic - put in another cpu?

[jamie]

hi,

we are coming up to peak season. i have been monitoring our top and load averages, and although the load average stays under 1, i quite often see

CPU0 states: 45% user
CPU1 states: 45% user

sometimes more than this, although it never stays more than that for more than 4 seconds. traffic however now builds until september.

will a second CPU help or should i look at installing a faster single CPU?

at the moment we have a xeon 2.2 ghz on redhat 7.2

much obliged :-)

<added> i just wanted to add that i have been watching the last few minutes and load average is currently
load average: 2.97, 2.11, 1.35

does this mean time for an upgrade already?

[VectorJ]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but it looks like you already have two CPUs (CPU0 and CPU1).

Anyway, if not, then yeah, I'd go with a second CPU over a faster single CPU. Having multiple CPUs running concurrently is always going to be better in a web server than one CPU trying to swap out and handle all of those web processes. I've found that database speed is dramatically improved with dual CPUs also (with MySQL at least).

[jamie]

vectorj

thanks for advice! it's what we suspected was the best option, nice to have some confirmation!

cheers

(p.s. we will be putting in more ram anyway)