Background
Supporting high online transaction volumes in real time, especially at peak time, can be challenging for telecom and financial services. To ensure uninterrupted service and a good customer experience, telecom and financial companies are constantly looking for ways to improve their services by enhancing their applications and systems.
AsiaInfo1 ADB* is a scalable online transaction processing2 database targeted for high-performance and mission-critical businesses such as online charge service3 (OCS). AsiaInfo ADB provides high performance, high availability, and scalability by clustering multiple servers.
This article describes how AsiaInfo ADB was able to take advantage of features like Intel® Advanced Vector Extensions 2 (Intel® AVX2)4 and Intel® Transactional Synchronization Extensions (Intel® TSX)5 as well as faster Intel® Solid State Drive hard disks to improve its performance when running on systems equipped with the latest generation of Intel® Xeon® processors.
AisaInfo ADB on Intel® Xeon® Processor-Based Systems
AsiaInfo engineers modified the ADB code by replacing the “self-implemented” spin lock to pthread_rwlock_wrlock in the GNU* C library6 (glibc). The function pthread_rwlock_wrlock can be configured to enable or disable Intel TSX with the environmental variable. With the new ADB version using glibc lock, when Intel TSX is enabled, the performance improves as shown in Figure 1 as compared to that of the original ADB version using the self-implemented lock.
For customers with limited disk space and cannot be expanded, they can enable the compress function. The ADB data compression function can save disk space by compressing data before writing to disk. This function is CPU intensive and impacts database performance. In order to do that, AsiaInfo engineers modified the ADB compression module using the Intel AVX2 intrinsic instructions.
New Intel Xeon processors like the Intel® Xeon® processor E7 v4 family provide more cores (24 compared to 18) and larger cache size (60 MB compared to 45 MB) compared to the previous generation of Intel® Xeon® processors E7 v3 family. More cores and larger cache size allow more transactions to be served within the same amount of time.
The next section shows how we tested the AsiaInfo ADB workload to compare the performance between the current generation of Intel Xeon processors E7 v4 family and those of the previous generation of Intel Xeon processors E7 v3 family.
Performance Test Procedure
We performed tests on two platforms. One system was equipped with the Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8890 v3 and the other with the Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8890 v4. We wanted to see how Intel TSX, Intel AVX2, and faster solid state drives (SSDs) affect performance.
Test Configuration
System equipped with the quad-socket Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v4
- System: Preproduction
- Processors: Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v4 @2.2 GHz
- Cache: 60 MB
- Cores: 24
- Memory: 256 GB DDR4-1600 LV DIMM
- SSD: Intel® SSD DC S3700 Series, Intel SSD DC P3700 Series
System equipped with the quad-socket Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v3
- System: Preproduction
- Processors: Intel Xeon processor E5-2699 v3 @2.5 GHz
- Cache: 45 MB
- Cores: 18
- Memory: 256 GB DDR4-1600 LV DIMM
- SSD: Intel SSD DC S3700 Series, Intel SSD DC P3700 Series
Operating system:
- Ubuntu* 15.10 - kernel 4.2
Software:
- Glibc 2.21
Application:
- ADB v1.1
- AsiaInfo ADB OCS ktpmC workload
Test Results
Figure 1 shows that the performance improved by 22 percent with Intel TSX enabled when running the application on systems equipped with Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v4 compared to that of the Intel Xeon processor E7-8890 v3.
Figure 2 shows the data compression module performance improved by 34 percent when Intel AVX2 is enabled. This test was performed on the Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8890 v4.
Figure 3 shows the performance improvement of the application using faster Intel SSDs. In this test case, replacing the Intel SSD DC S3700 Series with the Intel® SSD DC P3700 Series gained 58 percent in performance. Again, this test was performed on the Intel® Xeon® processor E7-8890 v4.
Conclusion
AsisInfo ADB gains more performance by taking advantage of Intel TSX and Intel AVX2 as well as better platform capabilities such as more cores and larger cache size resulting in improved customer experiences.