Is it worth starting HT in the processor?

[Jarek358]

I have an HP DL360 G6 with two Inel X5570 processor. I am using services: Snort, Squid, SquidGuard. Squid only for filtering, without caching on disk. Link 150/30, 150 users.
Is it worth starting HT support in the processor? I can have 8C / 8T or 8C / 16T. Will it profit or not? It seems to me that Snort uses only one core :(

[whosmatt]

@Jarek358:

I have an HP DL360 G6 with two Inel X5570 processor. I am using services: Snort, Squid, SquidGuard. Squid only for filtering, without caching on disk. Link 150/30, 150 users.
Is it worth starting HT support in the processor? I can have 8C / 8T or 8C / 16T. Will it profit or not? It seems to me that Snort uses only one core :(

That's a good question.  My gut says you wouldn't see a tangible difference either way with only a 150/30 link.  Maybe next time you need to reboot it for whatever reason, turn it on if you want to see for yourself.  Either way, that's probably quite a bit more processing horsepower than you can really use with your WAN connection.

[Hugovsky]

I've read somewhere that using HT increased latency. Can't remember where.

[VAMike]

hyperthreading effectively doubles your registers and halves your cache. whether that's a net win is entirely workload dependent. in the best case your latency and throughput will both increase.