With the additional resource requirement I wrote about a couple of weeks ago, I ended up deciding it was time to upgrade the server here (Rio) with some additional CPU hardware. When building Rio late last year, I wanted to make sure the hardware was fairly upgradable. The easy choice at the time was to go with Athlon 64 processors, since I could start with a pretty basic 2Ghz single core chip, and have the option to upgrade to a dual-core CPU later on. Well, that time is now, and today the new processor arrived. I ended up purchasing an Athlon 64 X2 4600+ processor, which boils down to a 2.4Ghz dual core CPU. Fortunately, with AMD’s price drop just a couple of months ago, I didn’t pay much more for this processor than I did for the original.

One thing I was a bit surprised with was the difference between the new and old heat-sinks. I wasn’t expecting much of a difference between retail CPUs in the same processor line-up, but the new one is of a much higher quality. Here’s a picture…

So now I have to do some real-world benchmarking to find out just how much faster this CPU will go. I suspect the database importing times will improve dramatically, and the server will be much more usable while the update is taking place with the additional core. I’ll probably post again here with some benchmarks when I’ve had a chance to try things out.

With most of the forecast back-end work complete, I’m hoping to release a public beta sometime later this week or maybe next week. I just need to finish tweaking performance for the new CPU and smooth out some database replication issues. It sure will be a relief to have this new forecast system online.