AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 2: Enterprise Performance

Database Scaling Performance

Now we've given you an idea of how well these platforms compare in normal circumstances, but the life of a database server is rarely limited to one set level of load. As a website grows, the accesses to the database server become more frequent and the load on the server grows tremendously.

If left unchecked, a poorly planned server architecture could become bottlenecked by a single database server over the course of several months. You could have the fastest webservers in the world, but if they can't get the data they need because your CPU-bound on the database server then their power is useless.

For this test we took the two fastest platforms - the dual Opteron 244 and dual Xeon 2.80GHz and increased the size and load of the test database (for simplicity's sake we stuck with the AnandTech Ad DB test) from 1x up to 24x.

Here you can see that although the Opteron 244 and Xeon 2.80GHz both start out at about the same level of performance, as the database grows in size and in load, the Opteron handles things much better.

This is a perfect real-world example of the Opteron's strengths as a multiprocessor system. Thanks to the high-bandwidth HT interconnect between the processors and thanks to the fact that each CPU gets its own memory controller, the scaling here is incredible on the Opteron 244 platform.

The black lines on the chart above are trend lines showing the overall performance curve of the two platforms; as you can see, the Xeon begins to level off much quicker than the Opteron, although both run into the I/O limitations of our testbed at around the same point and begin offering diminishing returns.

To make sure that these performance results aren't just due to the larger cache of the Opteron, we did a quick 1P vs. 2P comparison to see if the MP architecture of the Opteron platform actually does grant it an advantage over the Xeon. We chose a medium-sized database setting of 8x the original size and load of the Ad DB and came up with the following results:

Performance Increase over Uniprocessor Configuration 8x Load Ad DB Test - Opteron 244 vs. Xeon 2.80GHz AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) Intel Xeon 2.80GHz 23.5% 11.4% | 0 | 5 | 9 | 14 | 19 | 24 | 28

As you can see, the highly scalable architecture of the Opteron is helping it out considerably in this test. Not only will the Opteron offer higher performance immediately, it will provide for longer hardware lifetimes courtesy of its ability to handle more load than the Xeon.