No problem. If you will have a chance to post results please do it anyway.

single-threaded vs multi-threaded is really oversimplification.

T2000 should be advertised for multi-threaded workload when latency is not critical otherwise you may get into surprises. Tons of short queries may work or may not work – if you’re executing 100 1ms queries on Xeon to generate the page (sequentially) you may be well surprised by T2000 performance.

Same about Web server in general – if you had CPU consumption of 0.05 sec to generate web page in PHP for example going with T2000 may push you outside of acceptable response time.

Sorry I haven’t got back to this, but I’ll hopefully post some more benchmarks tomorrow. However, the single-threaded benchmarks aren’t going to do anything other than confirm what is already known: The Niagara isn’t aimed at single threaded workloads, and has never been advertised as such AFAIK. We are finding it to be well positioned for most web-based workloads (short queries, lots of them), but to do any data mining or long reporting processes we replicate to a more suitable server.

Thanks for posting. Though it would be great to get numbers for Opteron and for Single Thread workload.

We’ve got to pick our fights. There is only so much in depth research we can do vs amount of information we come across.

I constantly run into people having problems with T2000 for single thread applications, and this is information I want to share.

I do not have constant access to T2000 which would allow to perform good elaborate benchmarks. Before Users Conference I’ve asked one of my Sun contacts to get access to one so I could include benchmarks on it in my presentation – unfortunately he could not arrange for one.

A blog gives you the ability to quickly report findings but this blog certainly
lacked the normal proper technical research that I would expect from you.

Rgrds Mikael

The Niagara was running best at 32 thread concurrency — showing I believe a limit of MySQL to scaling out to more threads than this. Disk IO at this stage was fine (expected: separate disk IO tests showed the Niagara to excel here), so I am continuing to search for other bottlenecks. With low numbers of threads the Niagara was (predictably) slow, I only have results here from 4 threads upwards, but I can do some more tests for you if you like on Monday. I’ve still got a few days to finish up before we send the box back, so any suggestions on the most worthwhile benchmarks would help.

The Opteron ran it’s best at 8-12 threads.

Using Sysbench on 1M rows:

sysbench –test=oltp –num-threads= –max-time=60 –max-requests=0 –oltp-read-only=on run

T5120:
X=4: 400 TPS
X=8: 716 TPS
X=16: 1178 TPS
X=32: 1935 TPS
X=48: 1869 TPS
X=64: 1674 TPS

I do have some more R/W and benchmarks with different configs, but not at work to dig them out.

As far as getting your T2000 to work a bit better: http://hell.jedicoder.net/?p=88 contains some tuning resources at the bottom. I find the latest Coolstack release of MySQL has many of these applied already, so make sure you use that to test.

How much do you get from Sysbench for Opteron vs Niagara based system for _single_ thread. If you can share multiple threads it is also interesting

Essentially I am getting very similar results from each machine. The main difference is the resource utilization on the T5120 is much lower: 20% CPU versus 80-85% on the X4100. I have a while to go to see if I can do any better on both machines, but I am sure the Sun Niagara chips — especially in their latest incarnation — are very capable.

Well you’re free to run this little “Benchmark” test on your T2000 or new generation CPU and tell me what you get. It is not very scientific but it gives good ballpark figure for raw “in cache” calculation speed.

The frequency is not everything – for example “NetBurts” Xeons had about 2 times worse performance per Ghz compared to newer “Core” based one. It would be interested to know what do you expect in this case.

Regarding database – it was CPU bound “cached” workload which we’re speaking about – if things are IO bound it is strange to compare CPUs

1) This is feedback I’m getting from the clients – if they deal with Sun Sales – T2000 is what is frequently recommended for MySQL workloads with good discounts offered etc.

2) Right I know newer CPUs are out, though It looks like they are more expensive so I’m not hearing about people considering them too much. But anyway – I’m not writing about new generation of CPUs – I would like to hear if they are much better and write about it.

3) I think I’m clear in my post – I’m just saying T2000 is very low performing for single client workloads, because I think this is not communicated enough by Sun Sales and Marketing teams. Or can you give me a link for Sun benchmarks which would show how much T2000 is lower than Xeons for some workloads ?

Regarding “if you have single user you should not use database” this is very strange note about MySQL users – there are a lot of cases when there is a limited concurrency and many queries or complex queries being run. I mentioned replication as most obvious example

Plus see my note about page generation – performance with single client is the best latency you can expect, if this is not good enough already the fact you can run 1000 of them at the same time with zero performance regression does not help.

Regarding your examples first – with Xeons 16 cores (4×4) are getting commodity and this is a lot of native concurrency already. But again comparison of T2000 performance in high concurrency is not the topic here. I know some high concurrency users were quite happy while other have were not so happy.