Re: speed performances / hardware / cpu
antoine wrote:
I'm developing / supporting a java "client" application (running on PCs
with XP pro, jre 1.5) which is a high performance trading client. it
receives market updates, displays them on screen (swing), does a serie
of computation, and performs several actions based on computated values
(order sending, cancelation, etc...). it is designed to run for 8 hours
straight without interruption, does not access any database, only uses
socket-based I/O, and is correctly multi-threaded.
I'm looking at upgrading our workstations, to hopefully get a speed
increase. currently, our "base computation" routine takes around 5ms
average, and I'm looking at reducing this number (I'm also looking at
improving CODE performances, but this post is about hardware).
currently we're running on dual CPU intel Xeon 2.8GHz, roughly 3 years
old, with 1GB RAM. virtual memory usage is around 128MB, so I believe
RAM is not an issue.
which kind of upgrade would sound smart to you ? I've seen technologies
like:
- all the "dual core" family
- 64-bit architecture (although no JVM for intel on XP pro 64-bit)
- simply pushing the frequency to 3.6GHz...
does 64-bit make sense ? or is it only for memory intensive application
(we're more concerned with execution speed) ?
any insight or link to any informative page would be most welcome !
I agree that more memory will probably not help.
Higher frequency will almost certainly help (3.6/2.8 is +28%, but it
is not certain that the GHz are divideable like that).
Switching to 64 bit in itself does increase calculation speed, but
because x86-64 has more registers than x86 it may actually give
some (like +10%).
If you can parallelize to 4 execution units then 2 dual core CPU's will
certainly give a huge jump compared with the current 2 single core
CPU's (like +80%).
If your app frequently access data in the few MB range, then the
extra L2 cache in newer CPU's may also help.
Arne
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