SMP Server hardware recommendations.

[James Gurney]

The time honoured question.. what hardware should I buy? I know this has 
been discussed many times, but I have some questions.

We're currently running a 36 player DC server on an Athlon 2600+. This 
consumes up to 70% of the cpu at times. We'd like to run a second server 
on the same machine. In order to have enough cpu for this, we're looking 
at upgrading. However, there doesn't seem to be a single cpu that would 
be sufficient, so we're looking at dual proc machines.

Now, important question here.. there were problems identified with lag 
spikes when using an SMP kernel.. Was this just on machines where SMP 
support was compiled in, but only one processor was present? ie, is 
there going to be a problem with cpu spikes when using an SMP box?

Also, does anyone have any recommendations as far as what works best? 
Xeons? Opterons? They're both horribly expensive, so I want to make sure 
we get the best system possible. Is more L2 cache useful?

Any recommendations appreciated..

James
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