AMD Opteron Coverage - Part 2: Enterprise Performance

Web Server Performance under ColdFusion MX

We have been running database server tests ever since the NetBurst based Xeon was released at a mere 1.7GHz, but to this date we have never really done any webserver tests. Considering that Athlon MP systems power all of our webservers that are a part of our 22-server farm, we thought it would be appropriate to devise a test that would stress our web applications as well.

Our own in-house developer, Jason Clark, put together the test that simulates accesses to discussion forums running FuseTalk Community Edition. FuseTalk Community Edition takes full advantage of ColdFusion MX and is developed by FuseTalk, Inc.; the software is an enterprise-class version of the forums software we use at AnandTech.

As was the case with our database server tests, in order to create load we resorted to recording a sort of trace of usage patterns and played it back on the test system. The trace was recorded using Microsoft's Web Application Stress Tool; the tool allowed us to record all actions in a web browser, and then play them back with a multiplier in order to simulate a realistic number of clients. We instructed the tool to record the actions without any user delays so that we could truly stress the hardware.

The results reported were in the form of average request time (how long it takes a single page to become ready for download by the user) and total number of page requests (the number of pages actually served). Both metrics are useful and thus we report them all below:

Web Server Performance Average Request Time in ms (lower is better) AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) AMD Opteron 242 (1.60GHz) Intel Xeon 2.80GHz 171 182 267 | 0 | 53 | 107 | 160 | 214 | 267 | 320

The Athlon MP has served us well as a high-performance, low-cost webserver platform - and it looks like the Opteron is a worthy replacement. Even the 1.40GHz Opteron 240 (not pictured here), can outperform the 2.80GHz Xeon. The integrated memory controller helps performance here tremendously, not to mention the highly efficient multiprocessor architecture. The end result is that the average page request time is 36% faster on the Opteron 244 than on the 2.80GHz Xeon.

These sorts of page request times are reasonable for a server under heavy load; on the Opteron 244 server under load the results show that, on average, a page is ready for you to download 171ms after you request it by clicking on a link or typing in a URL - not too shabby.

Web Server Performance Total Page Requests Fulfilled AMD Opteron 244 (1.80GHz) AMD Opteron 242 (1.60GHz) Intel Xeon 2.80GHz 22713 21273 14874 | 0 | 4543 | 9085 | 13628 | 18170 | 22713 | 27256

Quicker page request times result in more pages that are able to be served, as you can see by this graph above.