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Mindcraft, an independent testing organization specializing in quantitative research. Mindcraft's study focused on servers
running Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Sun Solaris 9.0 and Red Hat Linux 8.0 on both web and DBMS server platforms.
The objective of this research was to reveal how server performance might improve incrementally by adding more memory as
an alternative to the installation of additional processors.
In conducting it's research, Mindcraft discovered the performance of Windows 2000, Solaris and Linux servers showed
significant improvement through the use of additional memory leading to performance benefits of as much as 40% over
servers with an additional processor and no increase in memory. The performance improvement could be as high as 1000%
on dual processor DBMS systems with the memory expanded from 512MB to 4GB.
WEB SERVER TESTING
A web server is comprised generally of hardware, operating system, server software, TCP/IP protocols, application software
and Web site content. A client or visitor views the content on the web server via HTTP request. Mindcraft used SPECweb99
to test web server performance. SPECweb99 measures a web servers performance while servicing a specific workload of
static and dynamic page requests. This workload is intended to simulate the type of requests that an Internet Service Provider
(ISP) would encounter on its web servers. The results from the web server tests are shown below.
Table 1: percentage performance improvement with
increased memory - 1CPU (Windows 2000 Server)
Increase memory to
Table 2: percentage performance improvement with
increased memory - 2CPUs (Windows 2000 Server)
Increase memory to
Base memory size
1GB
2GB
4GB
Base memory size
1GB
2GB
4GB
512MB
31%
46%
48%
512MB
37%
76%
90%
11%
13%
1GB
29%
30%
1GB
Table 3: percentage performance improvement with
increased memory - 1CPU (Sun Solaris)
Increase memory to
Table 4: percentage performance improvement with
increased memory - 2CPUs (Sun Solaris)
Increase memory to
Base memory size
2GB
4GB
Base memory size
2GB
4GB
1GB
51%
63%
1GB
66%
82%
63%
2GB
2GB
Table 5: percentage performance improvement with
increased memory - 1CPU (Linux)
Increase memory to
10%
Table 6: percentage performance improvement with
increased memory - 2CPUs (Linux)
Increase memory to
Base memory size
1GB
2GB
4GB
Base memory size
1GB
2GB
4GB
512MB
33%
48%
62%
512MB
53%
102%
125%
11%
21%
1GB
32%
47%
1GB
DBMS SERVER TESTING
Mindcraft used the OSDB (Open Source Database Benchmark) test suite to conduct the DBMS testing. The OSDB is based
on the ANSI SQL Standard Scalable and Portable (AS3AP) benchmark for relational databases systems. The OSDB
implements much of the AS3AP benchmark. It implements both single-user and multi-user tests for several types of data
base management systems (DBMSs). The single-user tests focus on database loading and index creation functions. They
also measure basic query and access method performance. The results from the DBMS test are below.
Table 8: percentage performance improvement with
Table 7: percentage performance improvement with
increased memory - 2CPUs (Windows 2000
increased memory - 1CPU (Windows 2002
Server)
Advanced Server)
Increase memory to
Increase memory to
Base memory size
1GB
2GB
4GB
Base memory size
1GB
2GB
4GB
512MB
9%
837%
1458%
512MB
24% 1510% 1559%
1GB
762%
1334%
1GB
1202% 1241%
Table 9: percentage performance improvement with Table 10: percentage performance improvement
increased memory - 1CPU (Sun Solaris)
with increased memory - 2CPUs (Sun Solaris)
Increase memory to
Increase memory to
Base memory size
2GB
4GB
Base memory size
2GB
4GB
1GB
376%
439%
1GB
775%
1010%
439%
2GB
2GB
27%