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Experimental Setup



Table: Server hardware information - hardware characteristics of three generations of the Intel Pentium processor, with some values measured by lmbench (11)
Processor P-II P-III P4 Xeon
Speed (MHz) 300 933 3000
Bcopy bandwidth (MB/s) 93 265 624
Read bandwidth (MB/s) 213 555 1972
Memory latency (ns) 245 101 116



Our main test platform is a uniprocessor 3.06GHz Pentium-4 with 1GB physical memory, one 5600 RPM Maxtor IDE disk, and a single Netgear GA621 gigabit Ethernet network adaptor. We use six 1.3 GHz AMD Duron machines as clients, with 256 MB of memory per machine. The network is a Netgear FS518 Gigabit Ethernet switch. All machines are configured to use the default (1500 byte) MTU. We use the FreeBSD 4.6 operating system, with all tunable parameters set for high performance - 128K max sockets, 64K file descriptors per process, 64KB socket buffers, 80K mbufs, 40K mbuf clusters, and 16K inode cache entries. We also investigate latency scalability using three hardware platforms which span three processor generations and an order of magnitude increase in raw clock speed. To equalize as many factors as possible, all machines use the same disk and network interface. The details of our server machines are shown in Table 1, with measured values provided by lmbench (11).



next up previous
Next: Workloads Up: Background Previous: Server Software
Yaoping Ruan
2006-04-18