siliconrax webserver

OPENBENCH LABS SCENARIO

UNDER EXAMINATION
Low-cost 1U rackmount web server

WHAT WE TESTED
Siliconrax-Sliger SRCX1110 1u rackmount server
www.siliconrax.com

HOW WE TESTED
Red Hat Linux v7.1
www.redhat.com

OBLcpu v1.0 benchmark
OBLdisk v1.0 benchmark
OBLload v1.0 benchmark

KEY FINDINGS
• Memory bandwidth limited to approximately 125 MB per second.
• Page delivery response rates never exceeded 1 second per page even under peak request load periods during which user requests were a sustained 1 page per second.

It would be hard to find a better example of this than the web. All buzz drones on over the winter of despair for all the dot-coms that have come and gone. The hidden story, however, is the spring of hope for all of the brick-and-mortar companies setting up shop on the web. For every high-flying dot-com like Boo that gloriously flames out, several old-line retailers come on-line with a basic e-commerce presence.

Driving this phenomenon are the new economics of the web: Necessary costs to establish an e-commerce infrastructure are negligible. Open Source software initiated this trend at the infrastructure level with Linux, Apache, and Perl. Now thanks to advances in chip fabrication and a price war between Intel and AMD, the cost a good rackmount server has dropped below $800.

Leading the charge into the arena of low-cost rackmount servers, which are the ubiquitous choice at ISPs and corporate data centers alike, is Siliconrax-Sliger. Their latest rock-bottom 1U server is the SRCX1110.

The SRCX1110 is built around a Coppermine flip-chip implementation of Intel’s Pentium III CPU clocked at 733 MHz. The server’s standard memory configuration has 128 MB of non-ECC PC133 SDRAM. Base storage comes in the form of a 30 GB ATA100 drive spinning at 7200 RPM.


	The SRCX1110’s 733MHz Pentium-III Coppermine CPU clocked in with a geometric mean processor index of 210 for the 34 kernels in the OpenBench Labs CPU test suite. This was right in line with the performance of an older standard 500 MHz implementation in a Dell PowerEdge 2400 server. If we examine the 95% statistical confidence interval for this CPU, it falls into a range of 195-to-253, while the older 500 MHz Pentium-III fell into a range of 134-to-163. Next we examined the performance of the memory subsystem of the SRCX1110. This was our first memory bandwidth examination of either a Celeron or Pentium Copermine implementation. The results were far from impressive. For small strides of 4 and 8 bytes, memory throughput appeared bounded in the 125 MB per second range. Typical Pentium-III performance with either PC100 or PC133 SDRAM is in the range of 250-to-300 MB per second for such small strides. At 16-byte strides performance converged on typical Pentium-III memory bandwidth performance. Typically, multiple simultaneous sequential I/O streams characterize the disk I/O profile of a web server. To assess the SRCX1110’s capability in this area, we ran our OBLdisk benchmark. With one thread—each thread corresponds to a single user instance—I/O throughput was a solid 17 MB per second for reads ranging from 2 KB up to 128 KB. In contrast, the ATA33 subsystem in the Siliconrax-Sliger DEMI hovered at 12 MB per second with one thread.

			In this first test of memory bandwidth of a Coppermine CPU implementation, we discovered a bottleneck in throughput at small (2-to-8 byte strides). With the Coppermine flip-chip CPU, memory bandwidth peaked at about 124 MB per second on our benchmark. Click to enlarge.

	1U 2 vu 4 less
	*Solid 1U rackmount servers costing less than a Windows 2000 Server license fuel the Linux-Apache web juggernaut.*

	by Jack Fegreus


	"Down, down, down. Would the fall never come to an end." So wondered Alice as she tumbled down the rabbit hole. So wonder many analysts as they ponder the market for IT goods. As they ponder, one thing is perfectly clear: It has never been a better time to be an IT consumer.


	For networking, the server has an Intel PRO 10/100 Ethernet controller. Our system also came with a 1U riser card for expansion. Powering the server is a 200-watt low-profile ATX power supply. Obviously, such a configuration will tend to run hot, even if it were not exacerbated by a tight 1U chassis configuration. To significantly improve heat dissipation, Siliconrax includes a solid copper heat sink with an integrated fan designed explicitly for Intel Coppermine flip chips. To test the Siliconrax-Sliger SRCX1110 as a web server, we began by loading version 7.1 of Red Hat Linux. The 52X Sony CD ROM on the server made quick work of this first step. We were now ready to calibrate the server’s base CPU, memory, and streaming I/O performance.

			In our CPU test, the Pentium-III Coppermine CPU benchmarked right in line with a standard 500 MHz CPU in a Dell PowerEdge server. Click to enlarge.


	By the time we reached 8 threads, the performance of the DEMI and SRCX1110 had converged in the 28-to-32 MB per second range. This performance is quite adequate for a typical web server including today’s lightly transactional web commerce servers. To give the SRCX1110 a thorough shakedown, we used this system to host our *e-Open* web site for a 3-week test. Over this period, the SRCX1110 did yeoman service in consistently delivering all requested web pages in under the 1-second minimum interval that our web monitoring software can report. The typical page request load on the server followed a classic bell-shaped normal distribution curve. Peak activity consistently occurred between 8AM and 12 noon EST. Driving the higher activity over this 4-hour period was the greatest overlap in user access from Europe, along with both the east and west coast of the US. In particular, sustained page view request rates over this period of peak activity would reach 1 page request per second. During this period, the SRCX1110 maintained a service level of under 1 second for delivery of every page requested.

			The ATA100 subsystem in the SRCX1110 sustained a streaming throughput for a single user thread of 17 MB per second. With 8 simultaneous threads, sequential I/O throughput converged on upwards of 30 MB per second. This is approximately 3 times greater than could be delivered on a 100 mb Ethernet LAN, let alone a T1 web connection. Click to enlarge.


	Over this shakedown period, we did run into a minor annoyance. The SRCX1110 utilizes a rocker on/off switch that automatically returns to the off position. During one thunderstorm, an extended power outage caused the UPS system to power down the server. As a result of the rocker switch, the system could not restart automatically and we were required to manually restart the web server. This one problem was the only blemish in the SRCX1110’s otherwise stellar performance delivering the e-Open web site.

			We used the SRCX1110 for three weeks as host server for e-open.ws. Over this period, peak page request periods reached sustained loads of 1 page request per second. The SRCX1110 was able to easily handle these requests; page delivery never exceeded 1 second. Click to enlarge.