Performance/LAMP

Benchmark Description

LAMP (acronym for Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) software stack is widely used for building modern web sites on Linux. So it's quite natural that there is a need to understand how well such type of workloads run in virtualized environment and how many LAMPs virtualization can bare on a single piece of hardware. 2 important metrics are presented in this report: total number of serviced requests/sec and average response time.

Implementation

To measure LAMP software stack performance and density we use DVD-Store E-Commerce benchmark developed by Dell. This benchmark is also widely used by RedHat and others.

Testbed Configuration

Hardware:

• Server: 4xHexCore Intel Xeon (2.66 GHz), 64 GB RAM, HP MSA1500 SAN Storage, 8 SATA (7200 RPM) Disks in RAID0
• Client: 4xHexCore Intel Xeon (2.136 GHz), 32 GB RAM
• Network: 1Gbit direct server <-> client connection

Platform:

• Virtualization Software: ESXi4.1upd1, XenServer5.6fp1, HyperV (R2), OpenVZ (RH6) 2.6.32-042test006.1.x86_64
• Guest OS: Centos 5.5 x86_64

Software and Tunings:

• Each VM/CT was configured with 1 vCPU, 1 GB RAM
• Small db was deployed from DVD Store samples
• Dvd Store benchmark client run string: ds2webdriver.exe --target=172.0.1.%VM% --think_time=0.05 --n_threads=3 --warmup_time=10 --run_time=10 --db_size_str=S --n_line_items=1 --pct_newcustomers=1
• Firewall was turned off
• All other tunings were left at default values

Benchmark Results

Summary

• OpenVZ shows the best performance over solutions tested: OpenVZ 38% faster than XenServer and more than x2 times faster than HyperV and ESXi under high load.
• OpenVZ shows the best response time over solutions tested: 33% better response time compared to ESXi and x2 times better response time than XenServer and HyperV