Bipul Kumar and Tomas Ramanauskas report on a test of the Sun Fire V480 versus Sun Fire T2000 server in the real-world, production environment found at BioMed Central, an open-access publisher of biomedical journals that publishes more than 170 journals and several other web-based products for the biomedical community. BioMed Central uses the Oracle 10g RAC database to store and serve the data required to run the websites, serving more than half a million transactions, nearly 40 million executions, several million page views and more than 70 gigabytes of data every day. The comparison revealed superior performance with the Sun Fire T2000.

The BioMedCentral database infrastructure uses two Sun Fire 480R servers as host machines and a Sun StorageTek 6130 Disk Array to store nearly one terabyte of data, which was showing signs of becoming overtaxed by service volume. The database workload consists of numerous small transactions, millions of read operations and few batch jobs to calculate reporting data. Some 90 percent is small Data Manipulation Language (DML)/read operations and 10 percent is large batch jobs.

The authors found that the Sun Fire T2000 server with 16 executable threads scaled very well with an increase in the number of concurrent sessions. The average response time for the 2-CPU Sun Fire V480 server started to increase rapidly after the number of concurrent sessions exceeded eight, whereas the increase in the average response time for the Sun Fire T2000 server was not so high. This test result, along with other stress testing, provided the authors with sufficient data to roll out the Sun Fire T2000 server into the production environment.

The test employed three different SQL statements to profile the CPU time and elapsed time as these were representative of the BioMed Central database workload. In all three cases, the elapsed time on the Sun Fire T2000 server is nearly equal to the CPU time required to execute the statements. Some of the improvements in CPU usage can also be attributed to the larger database cache size on the Sun Fire T2000 server compared with the Sun Fire V480 server. The database cache size on the Sun Fire V480 was 2GB, whereas on the Sun Fire T2000 server, it was configured as 10GB. Oracle text index synchronization was executed using a single thread on both the Sun Fire T2000 and V480 servers. Given the high number of executable threads on the Sun Fire T2000 server, the performance of such batch jobs can be improved further by running multiple parallel threads.

Test data demonstrated that UltraSPARC T1 chip with its multiple cores and multiple simultaneously executable threads is very well suited for an Oracle database running OLTP or hybrid applications. The Sun Fire T2000 server appears to provide a much better price-to-performance ratio for an Oracle database application compared with the Sun Fire V480 server. Because the Sun Fire T2000 server is a single-CPU machine, however, its availability is reduced in the event of a CPU failure. A multiple-CPU Sun Fire V480 server can still work if one CPU fails, whereas a Sun Fire T2000 server could be completely out of service in such case. In spite of this limitation, the authors decided the performance benefits and size of the Sun Fire T2000 server make it a great choice for running an Oracle database in RAC mode. [...read more...]

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