Friday, October 06, 2006

T2000 - more performance

I've managed to do a couple more performance tests on my loan T2000.

the first was kicked by by the announcement that pbzip2 is available on sunfreeware. Now, bzip2 is pretty cpu intensive, so if there's a way of making it go faster then I'm all for it.

So here are some figures - in seconds - for pbzip2 as a function of the number of cpus used. I've used a small blocksize (100K) rather than the default, which helps as the test file isn't all that big.








# cpusTime
116.444
28.686
44.287
82.791
161.821
321.784

That's pretty good. I would expect to get approximately a factor 8 gain here: it's a cpu intensive application and there are 8 physical cores. So we see about a factor 9, which is pretty good.

My next test was to load up an apache/php/mysql combo and see how that goes. The comparison machine is a SunBlade 2000 with a pair of 1.015GHz processors. (Note: this is using the same binaries - not optimised code on the T2000. Yes, Sun have optimised binaries, but that isn't really helpful in comparison, as with most applications a recompile wouldn't be feasible.)

For a simple database query operation, the T2000 took 0.160s as opposed to the 0.112s. For generating a graph, the T2000 was again slightly slower - 9.538s against 7.167s.

Again you see the single-threaded performance is at about the 60-70% of a regular UltraSparc cpu of the same clockspeed. But, this thing has 8 cores, how well does that work?

So I fired up the apache benchmark ab. And just for the database retrieval report I can get about 30 pages per second out of the SunBlade, but (with 32 concurrent requests) about 100 pages per second out of the T2000. And - according to top - the T2000 is only 50% busy. In fact, my server (apache/php/mysql) setup croaks if I push it much harder (but then it's a reporting thing designed for 1 page a minute).

So, on this test the T2000 is at least as good as 3 SunBlade 2000s. Or,equivalently, it's better than an 8x750MHz V880. Which is pretty good, as it's a fair amount cheaper and smaller.

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