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October 27, 2004
AMD64 Redux: Sun 40Z on fire!
A few months ago I blogged about AMD64/Linux 64 bit|JDK1.5 beta 64 bit.
The project I am on has purchased four servers. The servers are Sun 40Zs which consist of 4 AMD64 Opteron cpus. Fedora Core 2 64 bit and installs fine on them, as it should, because Redhat AS3 is supported and available pre-installed.
Extreme Performance
Running our application-specific benchmark, on the Sun 40Z we got 2700 JSP pages per second compared with 900 per second on the Quad Xeon 32 bit machines. That is 3 times the Xeon performance. On another benchmark we got 4,500 JSP pages per second!
Sun Microsystems Reborn
The client I am working at has been a loyal Compaq then HP user. However the Sun 40Z has recorded the some record benchmarks which got the client interested. These benchmarks have been born out by our own application specific benchmark results.
I think Sun's partnership with AMD is a great idea. The JDK 1.5.0 for AMD64 seems very fast and very stable. (We are running a week long stability stress test as I write). I think Ultra Sparc is washed up from a price-performance point of view. But AMD Opteron is 64 bit as well and rocks! I hope this leads to a rebirth of Sun.
I am also happy to finally be able to recommend some Sun hardware on price-performance alone.
JBenchmark
So how do you reliably record performance of 4,500 pages per seconds? Not with JMeter, which will fall over after 100. With jbenchmakr, a performance tool we rolled on our project, and one which is still a little raw, but which can reliably measure extreme performance.
ehcache
So how do you do 4,500 JSPs per second? Well, with ehcache, a high performance Java cache. I will be adding the JSP page filters to the project shortly, which use the BlockingCache constructs already there.
Posted by gluck at October 27, 2004 03:32 AM