Allan Packer's Weblog

As a final followup to my MySQL 5.4 Scalability on 64-way CMT Servers blog, I'm posting MySQL 5.4 Sysbench results on a Sun Fire X4270 platform using the Intel x86 Nehalem chip (2 sockets/8 cores/16 threads). All CPUs were turned on during the runs. The my.cnf was the same as described in the previous blog.

The Sysbench version used was 0.4.12, and the read-only runs were invoked with the following command:

sysbench --max-time=300 --max-requests=0 --test=oltp --oltp-dist-type=special --oltp-table-size=10000000 \
   --oltp-read-only=on --num-threads=[NO_THREADS] run

The "oltp-read-only=on" parameter was omitted for the read-write tests. The my.cnf file listed in my previous blog was also used unchanged for these tests.

Here are the results graphically running on Linux.

The read-only results for MySQL 5.4 show a higher peak throughput, but a tail off beyond 32 threads compared to MySQL 5.1. The drop off in throughput is clearly an issue that needs to be tracked down and resolved. By contrast, the read-write results show better throughput across the board for MySQL 5.4 compared to MySQL 5.1 and significantly better scalability.

Here are the MySQL 5.4 results graphically on Solaris (Sysbench 0.4.8). Note that in this case unused CPUs were turned off. The number of vCPUs is the same as the number of active threads up to 16. Active threads beyond 16 are using only 16 vCPUs.

Solaris shows better throughput than Linux for the read-only tests and good scalability across the range of active threads.

The Sun Fire X4270 platform with its Nehalem CPUs offers a clear demonstration of the improved scalability of MySQL 5.4. The results suggest that users can expect to be able to effectively use available CPU resources when running MySQL 5.4 instances on this platform.

Allan