Sun recently integrated AMD's six-core Opteron processors in its x64 blades and rackmount servers. With six processing units on each chip, the new processors help deliver increased performance for environments such as virtualization, database and web serving.

Sun Staff Engineer Jignesh K. Shah decided to test drive the Sun Fire X4140 set up with 2 x 6-core Opterons, 36GB RAM and Web 2.0 toolkit Olio.

Olio can help evaluate the suitability, functionality and performance of web technologies. It defines an example Web 2.0 application and provides three initial implementations: PHP, Java EE and RubyOnRails (ROR). The toolkit also defines ways to drive load against the application in order to measure performance.

Shah says he took the easy way out and selected Olio PHP's prebundled binary kit for this test drive. A storage array for Olio had to be set up and the Web 2.0 toolkit also required a web server and a database for its metadata store.

The Sun Fire X4140 was preconfigured with Solaris 10 5/09. Shah downloaded MySQL 5.4.1 beta and the Sun Webstack kit, which has Apache Httpd 2.2, PHP 5.2 and Memcached 1.2.5. Olio is configured to use the Webstack by default.

OpenSPARC Project Faban, a facility for developing and running benchmarks, was used. Shah executed runs with file store and meta store preconfigured to handle up to 5000 concurrent users.

Shah's observations of this test:

• Beyond 10 cores run, the system memory (36GB) is not sufficient to sustain more concurrent users and fully utilize the remaining cores. RAM of 48GB or more is probably necessary to handle more users. He also notes that PHP is not completely thread-safe, so the web server spawned processes.

• The 1RU system handled more than 3200 users and had CPU cycles to spare. "It means you still have enough CPU to log into the system without seeing degraded performance," he writes.

• SMP (or, as Shah suggests it be called, SMC - Scalable Multi Cores) type systems help when the initial cores are added instead of using multiple single core systems.

Visit his blog to see the charted results.

Shah also decided to test the final release of PostgreSQL 8.4 (64-bits) in the download of Solaris 10 binaries on the system (Sun Fire X4140, 2 x 6-core Opterons, 36GB RAM). He used the iGen benchmarks from an earlier presentation. Pointing out the posted chart results, Shah writes, "Notice the crossing of the 400K tpm boundary with PostgreSQL here using this benchmark toolkit. None of my tests have ever done that before. I consider this to be a milestone achievement with PostgreSQL, Solaris 10, Sun Fire Systems with Opterons."

More Information

Olio on 6-core Opterons (Istanbul) based Sun Systems - Shah's blog entry

iGen with PostgreSQL 8.4 on Sun Fire X4140 - Shah's blog entry

Sun Fire X4140 Server

Six-Core AMD Opteron Processor

Olio

OpenSPARC Project Faban

Solaris 10 binaries of PostgreSQL 8.4 (64-bits) [...read more...]

		fullsource
Print Email Current Profile Archive Blog Generate newsletter