Sun is aggressively pushing T2000 as Scalable MySQL Platforms, and indeed it is Scalable in terms of high concurrency workloads – it is able to execute a lot of concurrent threads and so speed gain from 1 thread to say 32 thread will be significant.
But thing a lot of people miss is – Being Scalable is Not Enough – you need to scale from reasonable base to claim the good performance, and this is where T2000 performs subpar in many cases.
I often hear about people complaining queries take much longer on T2000 compared to recent Intel or AMD CPUs when there is no concurrent load – It is reported T2000 can be as much as 5-15 times slower in this case depending on the workload.
Here is example run of purely CPU consuming “Benchmark” function for 2.6Ghz Intel Xeon vs T2000:
|
1 |
<br># XEON<br>mysql> select benchmark(100000000,1+2);<br>+--------------------------+<br>| benchmark(100000000,1+2) |<br>+--------------------------+<br>| 0 |<br>+--------------------------+<br>1 row in set (1.50 sec)<br><br># T2000<br><br>mysql> select benchmark(100000000,1+2);<br>+--------------------------+<br>| benchmark(100000000,1+2) |<br>+--------------------------+<br>| 0 |<br>+--------------------------+<br>1 row in set (18.89 sec)<br><br> |
As you can see this is hell a lot of difference !
Depending on your application performance with single thread may be important or non important for you – it is surely important for the slave if you’re having active replication, if you’re running time sensitive long running CPU bound queries or if queries contribute significant time to generating web page.
For example if on Xeon queries take 50ms to generate the page, the MySQL Latency you may see on T2000 may be as high as 500ms which would be well above performance guidelines for many web applications.
I’m hearing Sun is working on new CPUs which would offer significantly higher single thread performance, but at this time I have to be very careful advising this platform to the customers.
