Internet Systems Consortium
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SummaryOur experience as authors of the BIND software is that the performance of BIND is limited primarily by the processor and memory performance of the server computer. Vendors normally advertise processor speeds, but the performance of a computer's memory subsystem is not readily available. We have identified several candidate server computer configurations based on price and availability and have measured the memory performance (bandwidth, latency, and cache performance) of each. Candidate computersWe selected computers from various vendors that were priced such that we might be able to buy 16 of them for about $100K. We also included computers that we know were unacceptably slow, so that we could have a wider spectrum of results from the measurement suites. This included:
We measured a number of other less-powerful systems, primarily to help us be confident in our measurement methodology. None of them was a realistic candidate to be our server choice. Measurement methodologyWe began with the memtest86 measurement suite (v3.2), by means of a bootable CD that did not involve the subject computer's installed OS. This program claims to measure transfer rates in megabytes/sec to and from memory and caches. We followed with the calibrator (v0.9e), which measures cache and memory latency and TLB performance, and with lmbench (v3.0a4). Combined results are shown below, separated by CPU maker (Intel or AMD). We were suspicious of the memory bandwidth number for the HP 1 unit, presumably because the memtest86 program is not interfacing properly with its hardware. We investigated further using the STREAM system (v1.0), which shows bandwidth numbers similar to those from memtest86 for all units except HP 1.
On the basis of these benchmarks, and of vendor prices, we selected the HP 1 system (DL 140) to use for our testbed. We began this benchmark assuming that AMD systems would be faster in our price range, but the data shows otherwise. |
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