Tuesday, February 07, 2006

Should I get a T2000?

So I'm looking at the new Sun T2000 boxes, and I tried the test program to see if my workload is suitable.

Now, this is a web server. That's all it does. And it's running coldfusion (ie JRun, as in Java), and Oracle, so first thoughts are that it should match pretty well. So I give pfp a whirl.

# /var/tmp/pfp -p 10
We observed 407247665 instructions separated
in 11.17% floating point and 88.83% others.

This workload is not recommended for UltraSPARC T1 systems.

That's not good!

OK, so that was an isolated incident. But this machine tends to stick at about the 1.5% grey area. This is typical:

# /var/tmp/pfp -p 10
We observed 1960035483 instructions separated
in 1.61% floating point and 98.39% others.

This workload is a potential fit for UltraSPARC T1 systems
and need to be tested.

Now, what I don't know is whether there's something odd about this machine, or Oracle, or Coldfusion, or the CMS sitting atop it, or the versions (oldish), or something about the fact that this is an old V880 running an old version of Solaris that pfp can't handle properly. But in any case, the T2000 doesn't look like a given.

I also tried looking at one of the machines I built myself recently, with an Apache/Tomcat/Postgres combo:

# /var/tmp/pfp 60
We observed 2132762256 instructions separated
in 0.05% floating point and 99.95% others.

This workload is recommended for UltraSPARC T1 systems.

That's what I expected. (And I get the same sort of thing on one of my Domino boxes.)

So I'm still unclear as to whether a T2000 would be a good bet for the old webserver.

1 comment:

Peter Tribble said...

Thanks! I don't understand it either, hence the blog entry.

I tried the kstat thing, and that doesn't really help - the fpu numbers are too low to be relevant. But as I recall these are the emulated instructions, not the ones that are done in hardware.

Looking more closely, it's all coming from the add pipe, which is a signature of memcpy done with VIS.