netzooid

About a week and a half ago I finally received my new Sun T2000 machine. While I was expecting a big machine, I wasn’t expecting a forklift pallette with a couple boxes on it. Nor was I expecting it to take two people to get down into my office. So it is a bit cluttered with boxes right now.

My first experience with the machine was a disappointment. I had a little run in with the Advanced Lights Out Manager (ALOM). ALOM is for “remote out-of-band management”. I.e. its a mini OS that lets you turn the machine on and off. When you start up the machine ALOM boots and you need to log into it to turn on Solaris. However, to log onto this machine you need a Serial->RJ45 cable and have to connect through your computer’s local serial port. Oy! What year is this? This actually wouldn’t have been that bad except that they didn’t ship that cable to me and no one in west Michigan sells one. So after a couple trips to the computer store and some soldering work, I managed to assemble one myself.

Power on. “My goodness, it sounds like a hurricane.”

Onto benchmarks. I had a specific project which I needed to benchmark last weekend involving web services. My first realization was that between my laptop and my desktop I wasn’t able to throw enough raw data at it to make it hurt. The benchmark involved 1K request and 1K response SOAP messages. I was maxing out at 1100 tx/s (about 1MB read/1MB write per second). While this was about 4-5x faster than my 2GHz Dell, I knew I wasn’t pushing it. CPU utilization on the Sun box was about 40% and both my client machines were at 100%. So this weekend I did a more thorough benchmark with large message sizes. I hope to do a follow up benchmark soon with small message sizes (1-5K), but I need to find more client computers first.

The Benchmark

• Server: Sun T2000, 4x 1 Ghz cores, 16 GB RAM
• Client: Dell Dimension 2400
• Network: Crossover cable, full duplex 100 MB/s

The benchmark was designed to test the web service performance of the machine. I developed a Customer web service. It contains the following operations:

• Add: Allows you to to submit an array of customers. (100K request, .4K response)
• Add Async: Same as Add, except no response message (100K request)
• Get: Allows you to retreive an array of customers. (.4K request, 100K response)
• Echo: Echoes an array of customers that you sent back to you (100K request, 100K response)

This should give a good idea of real world scenarios where data is being shared via a webservice. The web service used is described by this WSDL. The web service was run on XFire and Jetty. The underlying XML parser was Woodstox.

Results

I was mostly interested in two main numbers: throughput (MB XML/s) and latency (ms). Lets look at througput first:

As you can see, once we reach enough clients throughput is very consistent. Likewise, the latency scales very consitently with the # of clients:

Conclusions

The T2000 is a great machine. I would recommend it to anyone doing high volume web services. It can easily do 10 MB/s of XML/Web service throughput. To put the above numbers in comparison, it gets more than 5 times the througput of my Intel 2GHz Dell. I really regret not ordering the 8 core version as I think that would have made a big difference in my throughput. Latency is also quite reasonable provided you aren’t throwing more than 10MB/s of data at it. But if you do have spiked loads, it can definitely handle the extra connections. They’ll just need to wait their turn.

The one possible downside of the T2000 is that all the cores are 1GHz. So latency for any single message may be slower than if you were running a 4GHz machine. However, I don’t anticipate this being that much of an issue.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 19th, 2006 at 2:28 pm and is filed under Javercising, Web Services.