An Oracle white paper explains how the Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (Oracle BI EE) Release 10.1.3.4 performs under high user-loads, and how well it scales vertically and horizontally on two Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 servers running Solaris 10. The two identical T5440 servers, each with 4 x 8-Core 1.6 GHz UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors delivered the best performance of 50,000 concurrent BI EE users at around 63% CPU utilization.

The white paper, which reads 21 pages, details the specifics on the benchmark, including the setup, results, topology. It also recounts server configurations as well as Solaris tunable parameters.

Reflecting on the benchmark in his blog, Sun Software Engineer Giri Mandalika offers up some interesting facts:

• (Sun) did not attempt to get the peak number that can be achieved from the two T5440 servers in the benchmark environment. Now that there is an additional server in the test setup that is taking care of the Presentation Catalog and the database server, 2 * 28000 = 56,000 BI EE users would have been an achievable target -- but we opted to stop at the "magic" and the "respectable" number 50,000 instead.

• The entire benchmark run lasted for about 9 hours 45 minutes, and out of which 8 hours were the rampup hours where the 50,000 BI virtual users were logging into the application a few users at a time. LoadRunner tool reported only 4 errors for the entire duration of the run; and there are zero errors in the 60 minute steady state period during which the statistics reported in the document were collected.

• The BI EE Cluster was deployed on two T5440 servers running Solaris 10 5/09 operating system. All the nodes in the BI Cluster were consolidated onto two T5440 servers using the free and efficient Solaris Containers virtualization technology.

• The Presentation Catalog was hosted on ZFS powered file system that was created on top of four internal Solid State Drive (SSD) disks. The Catalog was shared among all eight BI nodes in the cluster as an NFS share. One 8-Core 1.2 GHz UltraSPARC T2 processor powered T5220 server was used to run the NFS server. Due to the minimal activity of the database, Oracle 11g database was also hosted on the same server. Solaris 10 5/09 is the operating system.

• Solid State Drive (SSD) disks with ZFS file system showed significant I/O performance improvement over traditional disks for the Presentation Catalog activity. In addition, ZFS helped get past the UFS limitation of 32767 sub-directories in a Presentation Catalog directory.

• Caching was turned ON at the application server, which led to minimal database activity on the server. Note hat the caching mechanism was turned ON even in the prior benchmark exercise.

• The low end CoolThreads CMT Server T5220 and the mid-range T5440 server once again proved to be ideal candidates to deploy and run multi-thread workloads by exhibiting resilient performance when handling large numbers of simultaneous requests from 50,000 BI EE virtual users. T5220 handled large numbers of concurrent asynchronous read/write requests from eight different NFS clients.

• NFS v3 was configured at the NFS Server as well as at the NFS Client nodes. NFS version 4 is the default on Solaris 10, and it might have worked as expected. However a handful of bug reports prompted us to go with the more matured and less buggy version 3.

• 3283 watts is the average power consumption when all the 50,000 concurrent BI users are in the steady state of the benchmark test. That is, in the case of similarly configured workloads, the T5440 server supports 15.2 users per watt of energy consumed and supports 5,000 users per rack unit.

Mandalika also provides a summary of the results with system-wide averages of CPU and memory utilization, along with a topology diagram, CPU usage graph and the competitive landscape.

More Information

Oracle white paper

Sun achieves the Magic Number 50,000 on T5440 with Oracle Business Intelligence EE 10.1.3.4 - Mandalika's blog entry

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition on Sun

Sun SPARC Enterprise Servers Set Three World Records [...read more...]

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