AMD's Athlon MP 2100+ vs. Intel's Xeon 2.4GHz - Database Server Comparison

AnandTech Forums Database Performance

Now it's time for the beast, the AnandTech Forums DB. With hundreds of users always logged on and thousands more just browsing the forums, this database gets a full workout. Now with over 92,000 registered users it has become a difficult task making sure our upgrade cycles keep up with the growth of the forums.

Currently our Forums DB server is running on a dual Athlon MP 1800+ platform which gives it enough headroom for the foreseeable future.

AnandTech Forums Database Performance Transactions per Second AMD Athlon MP 2100+ (1.73GHz) x 2 Athlon MP 2000+ (1.67GHz) x 2 Intel Xeon 2.4GHz x 2 Intel Xeon 2.4GHz x 2 (HT Enabled) Xeon 2.2GHz x 2 (HT Enabled) Athlon MP 1.2GHz x 2 Xeon 2.2GHz x 2 Xeon 1.7GHz x 2 AMD Athlon MP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Intel Xeon 2.2GHz (HT Enabled) Intel Xeon 2.2GHz AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz Intel Xeon 1.7GHz 218.2 211.1 207.9 207.3 205.9 185.5 175.9 156.6 141.4 134.5 123.2 112.8 96.7 | 0 | 44 | 87 | 131 | 175 | 218 | 262

Looking at this chart should be clear enough why we went with the Athlon MP for our Forums DB server. Although the dual 2.4GHz Xeon setup is able to come within 5% of the new Athlon MP 2100+ platform, this wasn't always the case with the slower CPUs.

What's interesting is that although we saw a pretty big performance boost enabling Hyper Threading on the 2.2GHz platform, we noticed absolutely no change when we did the same on the dual 2.4GHz setup. The two systems were identical leading us to believe that something else was preventing the Xeon from spreading its wings with Hyper Threading enabled. The only theory we had was that we were running into an I/O bottleneck with Hyper Threading enabled and thus we didn't get any tangible performance improvement from enabling the technology. Based on the performance boost we saw with the 2.2GHz platform, we expected Hyper Threading to put the 2.4GHz Xeon over the top.

We will be testing this more over the coming weeks to try and discover what caused the anomaly.