Downtime for Upgrades
You may have noticed a couple of hours downtime today, bringing our current 90 day uptime stat to a shameful 99.854%. But this was for a good cause – working within the venerable guts of the server in order to rip out and replace components long past their prime.
Previously we were powered by a pair of Xeon L5639’s providing 12 Westmere-EP cores running at 2.13GHz, attached to 192GB of memory. They’ve served well, but with their underwhelming performance in the modern era and an idle power of 170W during an eye-watering energy crisis, it’s time for them to join the e-waste/ebay pile.
Their replacement is a single solitary AMD Ryzen 5 5700X – 8 Zen 3 cores at 3.4GHz – with a more modest but hopefully sufficient 64GB of ECC memory. Paired with an Asrock Rack X570D4U motherboard, I also finally have remote management capabilities, woo.
Preliminary tests suggest a very welcome performance uplift of 2-3x across a wide range of workloads, including FreshBSD page generation. Typical front-page loads now take closer to 10ms instead of 20ms, and I measured drilling down to FreeBSD/src taking just 50ms, down from 130ms. Nice, if not exactly life-changing.
More importantly, power – testbench runs measured an idle consumption of just 30W, which is about what I expected. Sadly rehomed in the old Supermicro server case with its redundant hot-swap PSUs, a few more fans and a couple more hard disks, it’s somehow eating 100W. Better than nothing, but clearly more work is needed.