Vertical Scaling of Oracle 10g Performance on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on Intel Xeon Based Servers. Version 1.0

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Vertical Scaling of Oracle 10g

Performance on Red Hat ^® Enterprise Linux ^® 5 on Intel ^® Xeon ^® Based

Servers

Version 1.0 March 2009

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Vertical Scaling of Oracle 10g Performance on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5

on Inel® Xeon® Based Servers

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1. Introduction & Executive Summary

Customers seriously considering migrating mission-critical applications from UNIX to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) are demanding up to date vertical scaling data for Oracle performance. This is an update of an earlier study which demonstrated scaling up to 8 cores.

The goal of this study was to characterize the performance and vertical scaling of Oracle OLTP performance on RHEL 5 running on Intel Xeon based servers (up to 24 cores).

The OLTP workload was used because it represents a very common type of database workload which exercises both the memory and I/O sub-systems. The performance metric is TPM (Transactions Per Minute). Since this TPM performance metric is for a synthetic benchmark workload, the actual TPM for a real application will depend on the characteristics of the application.

Figure 1 illustrates the excellent scaling achieved up to 24 cores.

Figure 1

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2. Performance Testing Methodology

Database performance and scalability often depend on many factors. However, it is impractical to try and collect data for all values of all the factors that can influence Oracle performance on RHEL. In order to get some useful information out to our sales, support and consultants in the field in a timely manner some judgment must be exercised in selecting the subset of the data that can be collected with the time and resources available. Specifically selected were:

A. Workload Types:

• Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)

• Decision Support System (DSS)

The OLTP workload was used because it represents a very common type of database workload which exercises both the memory and I/O sub-systems. DSS workloads are less common and require large storage sub-systems. Since access to such storage subsystems was limited, we limited this version of the study to OLTP workloads.

B. File Systems:

• EXT3

• GFS

• NFS

• RAW device pseudo-files

The EXT3 file system was selected as the basis for most of the experiments. EXT3 is a journalled file system and is the default system on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Using a file system and/or LVM volumes for the Oracle databases maps to a large percent of users of Oracle on RHEL.

C. I/O Modes:

• Synchronous I/O

• Asynchronous I/O (AIO)

• Direct I/O (DIO)

• AIO with DIO (AIO + DIO)

• Raw I/O

In previous experiments it was observed that AIO+DIO consistently performed better than Synch I/O, Asynch I/O (AIO) and Direct I/O (DIO) for OLTP workload. So, studying AIO+DIO would yield the upper bound OLTP performance and scaling.

AIO+DIO is what we recommend to our customers for OLTP workloads.

D. X86_64 Servers:

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3. Oracle OLTP Performance & Scaling on RHEL 5 / Harpertown (Intel E5440)

3.1 Configuration

Processor

Dual Socket, Quad-Core (Total of 8 Cores) Intel Xeon E5440 (Harpertown) 2.83 GHz 8 GB RAM

Storage EqualLogic PS3800XV iSCSI Array

4.8 TB (16 x 300 GB, 15 K RPM SAS Drives) Operating System Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1

File System EXT3

Database Oracle 10g R2

3.2 Results

Figure 2

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4. Oracle OLTP Performance & Scaling on RHEL 5 / Tigerton (Intel X7350)

4.1 Configuration

Processor

Quad Socket, Quad-Core (Total of 16 Cores) Intel Xeon X7350 (Tigerton) 2.93 GHz

32 GB RAM

Storage HP StorageWorks 4400 Enterprise Virtual Array (EVA) 5.6 TB (20 x 280 GB Drives)

Operating System Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.3

File System EXT3

4.2 Results

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5. Oracle OLTP Performance & Scaling on RHEL 5 / Dunnington (Intel X7600)

5.1 Configuration

Processor

Quad Socket, Hex-Core (Total of 24 Cores) Intel Xeon X7600 (Dunnington) 2.66 GHz 32 GB RAM

Storage

HP StorageWorks 2000 Modular Smart Array (MSA) 1.716 TB (12 x 146 GB Drives) for Data +

2 x 80 GB Fusion IO SSD for Logs Operating System Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.3

File System EXT3

5.2 Results

Figure 4

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6. Conclusions

Database OLTP workloads represent a large portion of enterprise database customers real environments today. Chip vendors are driving scalability inovation through lager processor counts and cores/chip. As this trend continues to increase from dual-to-quad, quad-to-hex core on x86_64 servers, Open source Red Hat Enterprise Linux will continue to optimize the OS for database scalability for enterprise applications like Oracle such that users derive incremental improvement in real customer environments as cpu-cores increase. While the hardware design ultimately determines the position of the scale curve, the OS and it

capabilities effect the slope of the curve.

This study demonstrates that given adequate I/O bandwidth, Oracle database OLTP performance scales very well up to 24 cores when Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5 on Intel Xeon servers.

In the future, we expect to demonstrate vertical scaling of database OLTP performance to servers with:

• even larger number of cores / hyper-threads

• newer chip technology, e.g., Intel Nahalem

7. References

1. Red Hat Reference Architecture: Tuning & Optimizing Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) for Oracle 9i and 10g Databases. Version 1.1, November 2007.

https://bu-platform.devel.redhat.com/bu/prgrms/refarch/Oracle-Tuning-Guide%201- 1%2011-28-2007.pdf

2. Red Hat Reference Architecture: Performance & Scalability of Virtualized Oracle 10g Servers on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Version 1.0, June 2008.

https://bu-platform.devel.redhat.com/bu/prgrms/refarch/Oracle-10g-recommendations- v1.2.pdf

Vertical Scaling of Oracle 10g Performance on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on Intel Xeon Based Servers. Version 1.0