AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 2: Enterprise Performance

The same ol' SQL Tests

At AnandTech we've always advocated real-world benchmarks, especially with enterprise-class CPUs. When it comes to real-world enterprise benchmarks there are the massive TPC benchmarks available online, but there's very little offered for the small-to-medium enterprise applications. Luckily, at AnandTech, we're sitting on a goldmine of real-world test data since every day our servers are hit by hundreds of thousands of users looking to get the latest info on the greatest hardware.

We harvested the power of this resource by recording a trace of every access to each one of our three database servers: the Website, Advertising and the Forums database servers. With these trace files we can then playback those accesses in a highly repeatable fashion, on any machine we choose, thus we can gauge the performance of the platforms we're reviewing today in our own server environment.

Here's a description of the types of accesses that occur in each one of the three databases:

The Web DB is where all of our content is stored; everything from news and reviews to our own internal article rankings are stored in this database. By far the majority of the transactions on this database are selects (reads). Remember that the web site only really offers one way interaction, the readers come to the site and read articles which are contained in this database. The articles are selected from the database and fed to one of the 6 web servers for assembly into a page for your browser. Internally, some update queries are also run, but they were not recorded in the test trace we ran. This database is the smallest out of the three; the DB was only 300MB when we ran the test.

The Ad DB is very similar to the web database in that quite a few selects are running. The select queries are used to pull the ads from the database for display in the user's browser. There are also a number of stored procedures that run along with the selects, but to keep things as simple as possible (at least for this comparison), we omitted them from the test trace. The Ad DB is noticeably larger than the web database, at a large 2.1GBs at the time of publication.

The final database is the Forums DB, which is by far the most transaction intensive database in the AnandTech Network. While the vast majority of the requests to the DB are in the form of selects (users reading categories and threads), there are significantly more inserts and updates (posting, thread/post counts, etc…) than in either of the other DBs. This database is also our largest, weighing in at just under 3GB during the testing and close to 12GB today (we used an older version of the DB from a over a year ago).

In the past, when we used database server testing, it was done using a single trace run on the AnandTech Forums. While we're using two additional databases, the test methodology remains the same. We recorded a trace of transactions on each one of these databases for a set period of time. These were live recordings while the website and forums were being accessed just like they would on any normal day. The traces were then played back at full speed (as fast as the server test bed could replay them) and their playback times recorded. We divided the number of transactions replayed by the playback time and reported all scores in numbers of database transactions per second: the higher the better.

What's unique about this round of server benchmarks is that we're actually forming the next set of tests that we're going to be running on the Opteron from the database accesses that occur while you all are reading this article. It has been well over a year since we updated our database tests and our server load has grown tremendously since then, so updated benchmarks are necessary. At the same time we've also got a new set of web tests based on our web architecture that we will be debuting along with the new DB tests once they're ready, so keep hitting these servers while you read the article - the more load we put on the DBs, the more stressful our tests will be for next time. How does it feel to be a part of a benchmark?