Ricky Beam wrote:
Very little. Simple web serving is just reading crap from a disk and putting out through the network. There's not a lot of complex computation involved.
I agree.
If we are talking about straightforward web serving, CPU is of little importance, AIUI particularly if bus mastering on the NIC is available.
If you are running PERL, then this changes things substantially. Interpreted languages are CPU intensive. I have found the AMD athlon processors twice as powerful with equal Ghz to Pentium III. I have not tried with P4. I have written a test suite to act as a comparison but not yet run it on P4.
As we already know, database apps benefit from lots of memory and I/O speed. CPU not really important.