WEB Performance: Digital's Web AlphaServer™
1000 vs. Pentium 133 Based Server with Windows NT ™
Results for World Wide Web performance testing using Windows NT
on Alpha and Intel running Netscape software are now in.
Still need more proof that the power of an AlphaServer
can improve your productivity? Take a look at how an AlphaServer
system's advantages have been proven to maximize Internet productivity.
In a recent benchmark performance test using Netscape
Communication Server V1.12 software and Windows NT, Digital's
AlphaServer 1000 4/266 outperformed an Intel Pentium 133 MHz server
by almost 70 percent. The AlphaServer 1000 4/266 managed to process
176,868 requests to the Pentium's 104,829.
This overwhelming performance advantage is due to
the extra processing power and scalability of Digital's AlphaServer
1000 4/266 system. While the Pentium system reaches 100 percent
CPU utilization at a little over 104,000 requests per hour, the
extra processing power of the AlphaServer continues to service
requests at a rate of about 1.7 requests to the Pentium servers
single request. Given the Input/Output (I/O) expansion capabilities
and memory scalability of the AlphaServer 1000, this performance
advantage will continue to grow as faster processors and upgrades
become available.
Almost as important as how many requests a server can handle, is how long it takes to service those requests. Customers who wait for information are customers who look elsewhere for it next time. Benchmarks show that use of the AlphaServer 1000 4/266 can improve service time to customers by almost 65 percent over Pentium based servers.
Test Description:
The Web server workload consisted of a large number
of clients (up to 150) continuously requesting files from the
server being tested. The requested pages in Netscape were selected
at random from a directory of 16,000 files available on the server.
Testing measured the throughput rates of servers while 16 Kilobyte
files were being requested.
Some of the factors that will affect the performance of your WEB server on Windows NT are:
Because a large number of files (16,000) were used
, little caching of files occurred. Indeed, if the number of
files had been limited and allowed to remain in cache the throughput
might possibly have doubled!
Test Results:
The Pentium server was configured with one Ethernet
controller and three disks for the documents. At 104,829 requests
per hour the Pentium system fully saturated all key subsystems;
disk, memory and CPU. The AlphaServer 1000 4/266 had additional
processing capacity so an additional RAID controller and network
card were added. This was done to take full advantage of the available
power of that system. Testing showed that in an NT environment,
where many files are accessed, the primary bottleneck for the
AlphaServer 1000 will be the disks and the secondary bottleneck
will be the network. Additional RAID controllers for disk striping
and network cards can be used to augment the Input/Output (I/O)
subsystems and get even better performance from the system.
Test Configurations:
The following table presents the findings for each
of the platforms tested including average service times:
Still Have Questions?
For more information contact your local Sales Office
or write to the Application Systems Engineering Performance Group
online at mail address asepg@zko.mts.dec.com.
Updated: Sunday, March 31, 1996