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Intel's newest Quad Xeon MP versus HP's DL585 Quad Opteron

 by Johan De Gelas on November 10, 2006 12:00 PM EST
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MySQL Configuration

As our loyal readers know from our previous MySQL adventures, the MySQL database is a highly tweakable but somewhat badly scaling database. Most workloads scale well from one to two cores, but from two to four cores scaling is very mediocre, and in the "SELECT intensive" workload that we benchmark even negative. This has surprised quite a few people, but it is an issue that the InnoDB team is well aware of, and the issue will be resolved in one of the next releases of InnoDB. Until then, we compiled version 5.0.26 with Peter Zaitsev's Mutex patch. This Patch gives much better scaling and performance. Scaling is no longer negative, and we saw a 20% to 40% increase going from two to four cores. However, our workload still doesn't scale beyond four cores, so we tested all CPUs with two CPUs and four cores. That way we have at least an impression on how the different server CPUs compare.

All testing was thus done with InnoDB as our storage engine in MySQL 5.0.26. We optimized for a server with 4GB of RAM. Here is our MySQL configuration:

MySQL Configuration
default-storage-engine InnoDB
skip-external-locking
skip-locking
key_buffer 256M
.
table_cache 64
max_allowed_packet 1M
thread_stack 128K
.
sort_buffer_size 2M
read_buffer_size 2M
innodb_buffer_pool_size 1G
.
thread_concurrency 16
innodb_thread_concurrency 16
innodb_additional_mem_pool_size 8MB
read_rnd_buffer_size 8MB
thread_cache 64
max_heap_table 256MB
tmp_table 128MB
.
innodb_log_file_size 250MB
innodb_table_locks 0
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit 0
max_user_connections 2000
max_connections 2000

The "query cache" was off, as we wanted to test worst case performance. Our test database is still the same ~1GB database. The workload consists of more than 90% selects, mostly a "read intensive" workload.

MySQL results

All numbers are expressed in queries per second (Y-axis), and the X-axis shows the number of concurrent accesses.


On average is the Xeon DP 5160 is about 22% faster than the Opteron. That means that the Opteron is clock for clock as fast as the Xeon 5160, which is not bad news for AMD at all, although Woodcrest currently has the raw clock speed advantage. Considering the HP DL585 can only use DDR-333 with the Opteron 880, the picture might even get better with the DL885 which can use DDR-400.

There is little doubt that MySQL is not the favorite application of the Xeon MP: the Opteron 880 beats Xeon MP by 20% to 30%. We have seen this before as the Opteron has always outrun "NetBurst" based CPUs in MySQL. The good news for Intel is that the new Core architecture is no less than 52% faster in MySQL when we compare the 3 GHz Xeon DP with the 3.2 GHz Xeon MP.

We also noted something strange: the Xeon MP performs better with hardware prefetch disabled. Below you can see our findings. All numbers are expressed in queries per second served by the server (Y-axis); and the X-axis shows the number of concurrent accesses.


Hardware prefetch lowers performance by about 1% to 4%, while Hyper-Threading allows the Xeon MP to make better use of its potential and increases performance by 7% to 9% at the higher concurrencies.

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