Choosing a Processor Speed
Go Up to Hardware Configuration
The performance of database systems tends by nature to be bound by I/O bandwidth or network bandwidth. An application often waits for I/O or network operations, instead of being computationally intensive. A fast CPU clock speed gives definite performance advantage, but a 10% increase in CPU clock speed is less important for server performance than some other hardware factors, such as RAM configuration, I/O system, or network hardware.
CPU clock speed is often more important on client platforms, because applications that use data might perform CPU-intensive computational analysis on data, or might render sophisticated visualization of data in a computationally costly manner.
It’s not appropriate for this document to recommend a specific CPU clock speed for your server, because it is likely that such a recommendation would be obsolete as you read it. You should evaluate the benefit of spending more money on a faster CPU, because the price/performance curve becomes steep for the latest CPU hardware.