Core Count vs Clock Speed for FreeNAS

[mjk79]

Hey Guys,

I'm planning on upgrading my single E3-1241v3 to probably a pair of newer Broadwell EP processors.

My question is would freenas benefit more from higher clock rate (2x 3.5ghz 4 core chips) or higher core count? (2x 2.1ghz 8 core chips)

I am running a fair amount of jails, plex servers, etc. I'm not looking for price to performance here, strictly performance. Which hypothetical configuration would freenas benefit more from?

Thanks for any help!

 

[Stux]

Plex benefits from more cores. Samba benefits from more single thread performance

 

[Dice]

Typically the 'powerhouse' recommendation is the E5-1650. Aka, prioritizing higher clock over multiple cores.

 

[Evi Vanoost]

Depends on your usage pattern. I prioritize cores and bus transfer speeds (GT/s) over clock speed because I primarily use NFS and 10Gbps for hundreds of users, I never use more than a few % of any CPU even with compression enabled.

If you're looking to run encoders and other high CPU processes, then you might want to look at clock speeds but for file sharing, not worth it.