With the recent release by Sun of the Sun Blade X6270 based on intelligent and automatic Intel Xeon X5500 processors, reports of application performance are beginning to surface. The performance of Oracle Weblogic Application Server 10.3 is one such report contained in the weblog of Ramin Moazeni.

Moazeni describes the workload as " ... a moderately complex benchmark involving different components, including JMS, WebServices, and external systems such as database. The baseline application involves a mix of HTTP and HTTPS protocol requests, the login action transaction are via secured protocol."

The Sun Blade X6270 in the test has 2 x Intel Xeon X5560 running at 2.8GHz clock speed and 24GB of memory and running Solaris 10 10/08, Moazeni explains. The Intel Xeon processor 5500 series provides Turbo mode and Hyper-Threading mode options in the BIOS setup. The Turbo mode enables automatic increases in processor frequency when the system has plenty of head room for power consumption, Moazeni writes. The Hyper-Threading mode enables engaging hyper-threading when needed, so that each socket containing 4 cores can effectively scale 8 threads. The test results were gathered with both Turbo mode and Hyper-Threading mode enabled, he notes.

Four instances of Oracle Weblogic Server were installed on 4 Solaris zones and configured and tuned optimally on the Sun Blade X6270 platform, the author continues. Not wanting the database to run into the network/disk contention, it was created in /tmp, using a Sun Fire E6900 and a Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000. The intention was to eliminate the database configuration issues and to just measure the Application Server machine scalability, Moazeni adds.

The blog reviews the tuning operations performed in order to obtain the best performance with the Sun Blade x6720. These include Weblogic Application Server Tuning, Sun Java 6.0 update 6 Tuning, and Network Tuning.

In his conclusion, Moazeni states that the Oracle WebLogic Server 10.3 on Sun Blade X6270 shows excellent scalability and performance. The application that was benchmarked represents a complex use-case with moderate to heavy database usage. The results show 2.6 x transaction/sec improvements over Sun Blade X6250 having 2 Quad-Core Intel Xeon L5430 running at 2.66GHz clock speed with 32GB of Memory.

More Information

Sun Blade X6270 Server Module product page

Datasheet

Benchmarks [...read more...]

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