The Sun BluePrints article "Tuning Symantec Brightmail Antispam on Sun Servers with Coolthreads Technology" (log in or registration required) provides background information on SBAS software and CoolThreads technology-powered servers, the configurations used for performance measurements, the challenges presented by benchmarking anti-spam software, and the actual steps used to tune the hardware/software combination to achieve the reported performance levels.

The article was originally published in October 2006 and reflected performance on the Sun Fire / Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 server. It has been updated to reflect more recent measurements comparing a Sun Fire / Sun SPARC Enterprise T1000 and T2000 servers to a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server using virtually the same tuning parameters. It goes farther, comparing how the combination of tuning and the use of Solaris Zones partitioning technology gives the four-socket Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server an even greater edge in screening out unsolicited email.

The article reports that the performance advantage of running highly multithreaded software such as SBAS is so great that, out-of-the-box, with no tuning, Brightmail on a Sun Fire / Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 server with a single eight-core UltraSPARC T1 processor outperforms a Sun Fire V240 with two single-threaded UltraSPARC processors by more than 50 percent.

In order to best take advantage of the CMT capabilities of these processors, administrators should make some relatively simple tuning adjustments to SBAS software. The result of taking the simple steps described in this Sun BluePrints article yielded a 5.2x improvement over the same installation with no tuning. Performing the same set of tuning steps on a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server yielded an additional 2.33x performance improvement over the Sun Fire / Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 server. Tuning a Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 server, including using virtualization, yielded an additional 3.7x performance improvement over the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 server.

After tuning both the SBAS operating parameters and the Solaris OS shared library environment, initial tests using a Sun Fire / Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 server showed a performance increase from an out-of-the-box 18 messages/sec. to 94 message/sec., a 5.2x improvement. Comparing the tuned Sun Fire / Sun SPARC Enterprise T2000 performance to out-of-the-box Sun Fire V240 (dual processor) performance, an 8.2x increase was achieved. Most of the performance improvement is directly related to increasing the thread count in SBAS and reducing the contention for locks that arises from having a large number of active threads.

The article observes that, in Sun's successive generations of processors, servers based on those processors deliver more than double the previous generation’s performance. The first step, moving from traditional UltraSPARC processors to the UltraSPARC T1 processor, yielded a performance increase of 8.2x. Comparing UltraSPARC T1 and T2 processor-powered servers, revealed an additional speedup of 2.33x when testing two fully-tuned servers. Comparing UltraSPARC T2 and T2 Plus processor-powered servers showed an additional speedup of 3.7x when between fully-tuned servers.

The authors conclude that the series of tuning steps and their results give an indication of the kind of performance improvement that UltraSPARC T1, T2, and T2 Plus processor-powered servers can deliver in comparison to traditional, highly pipelined microprocessor-based servers.

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