Depending on whether the application requires many read/write queries, it may help to set the database connection pool to the number of processing cores. For read-only testing, all HP Proliant c-Class Blade Servers in the test can still handle almost the same number of transactions even though the number of concurrent threads is double the number of processing cores. Therefore, more database connections than the number of processing cores for read-only applications can be used.
NOTE: For read/write testing, the maximum performance (shown in bold in the following result tables) was achieved when the number of concurrent threads was the same as the total number of processing cores in the system.
Interpreting the Data
The results of the testing are presented in the following sections and show the maximum number of tps that each of the systems can handle, depending on the number of threads. The precise database query load and mix of queries that an application generates vary greatly between applications. Another important consideration in the benchmark testing was how many concurrent connections the application had with the database server. The results in the data tables show that having more connections can negatively impact the throughput.
If an application requires 1200 read/write tps from 16 database connections, all of the HP Proliant c-Class Blade Servers used in these tests are suitable because all of the test servers can handle at least 1245 tps. For read-only applications that require 2000 tps using eight database connections, both the HP ProLiant BL465c and BL685c servers, configured with 2 Dual-Core Opteron processors, are suitable having a capacity of 2500 tps. The ProLiant BL460c server and BL480c server, configured with 2 Quad-Core Xeon processors, can handle a maximum of 4500 read-only tps and 3000 read/write tps. For an application that requires more than 4500 read-only or more than 3000 read/write tps, consideration should be given to using MySQL Replication and spreading the load across multiple ProLiant servers.
HP Proliant BL460c Server
The HP ProLiant BL460c server has features that are equal to standard 1U rack-mount servers. The two-processor, dual-core or quad-core ProLiant BL460c combines power-efficient compute power, and high density with expanded memory and I/O for maximum performance. The ProLiant c7000 enclosure supports up to 16 BL460c server blades, two more servers than the IBM BladeCenter, and each BL460c supports double the memory capacity of the HS21 server without an expansion blade. The Proliant BL460c now comes with dual-core and quad-core Intel® Xeon® processors, DDR2 fully buffered DIMMs, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) or Serial ATA (SATA), hard drives, and support of multi-function NICs and multiple I/O cards. The BL460c provides a performance system ideal for the full range of scale-out applications. In this small form factor, the BL460c includes more features to enable high-availability, such as hot plug hard drives, mirrored memory, online spare memory, memory interleaving, embedded RAID capability, and enhanced remote Lights-Out management. Table 7 provides the benchmark results that were obtained using a ProLiant BL460c server configured with two Quad-Core Intel® Xeon® processors running at 3.0GHz.
NOTE: Maximum performance appears in bold.
Table 7 SysBench Results for the HP ProLiant BL460c Server
| Read/Write (tps) | Read Only (tps) | Read/Write (tps) Fibre | Read Only (tps) Fibre |
Connections | Internal SAS | Internal SAS | Channel SAN | Channel SAN |
1 | 624 | 794 | 610 | 809 |
2 | 1057 | 1454 | 1029 | 1330 |
