A Sun case study focuses on its CMT series, including the UltraSPARC T1, T2 and T2 Plus processors. Author Wynne Wang looks at how a slip in the performance of a non-CMT platform might become a bottleneck in the CMT environment and the possible solutions that could alleviate these type of data center issues.

The subject of this examination is a Shanghai Web 2.0 independent software vendor (ISV) providing online games for millions of players. It was looking for an IT solution for their increasing business and decided to adopt a CMT platform.

A performance test for its web blog system, which provides an information center with a blog and portal features for the players, was conducted. The blog system was built on an open source stack with Apache Struts, SpringSource Spring, Apache Tomcat, and Apache iBATIS. The company used a Sun Fire T2000 server as the hardware platform for the performance test. The Sun Fire T2000 server is equipped with an UltraSPARC T1 CPU, which is CMT-enabled. There are eight cores on the socket, and a single core can execute four tasks at the same time. So there are 32 virtual CPUs on the chip.

After deploying the software stack, ApacheBench was used to generate the test load. At first, the performance did not appear good: The CPU usage was only 10%. There wasn't evidence of a shortage of network bandwidth, lack of memory, or heavy activities on disk I/O, but the average access time was 3.3 seconds for the test case, which seemed a bit too long. Wang reports that the issue seemed to be the blog application wasn't making full use of the CMT chip, and tuning of the Java technology-based application need to take place.

In the article, Wang assesses the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) options and Spring framework, finding blocks and locks as the stack is investigated. Read the full article to see the solutions applied.

More Information

Case Study: Web Application Tuning on Chip Multithreading Platforms - Wang's article

Sun CMT Servers

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