topic Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance in Operating System - HP-UX

oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Tony Drake_2 — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 10:30:18 GMT

Does anyone have some real numbers as far as the difference between performance on a PA RISC server and an Itanium server (ie anyone migrated from one to the other?)

We have some apps that are doing just that, and we need some preliminary idea of just how many Oracle instances we can stack on these consolidation servers. Since we just put in the systems, we don't really have any good benchmarks.

Thanks.
Tony

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Alzhy — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 12:01:53 GMT

I am not aware of any published BMs but I suppose the disparity is wide. Look at the TPC web site.. virtually all of the top performers are no longer RISC based chips (with the exception of IBM's POWER of course) .. most are Itanium2 or Opteron.

As an FYI to everyone:

HP just announced that it will spend 3 Billion dollars in the next 3 years on Integrity Systems -- so I guess the roadmap will really be for an Itanium one.

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

A. Clay Stephenson — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 12:16:10 GMT

Will you be running native or RA-RISC code on the Itanium boxes? If native then you don't need to have any concerns. If PA-RISC code is being executed under the ARIES emulator then you can expect about a 3X or so performance hit depending upon which Itanium and which PA-RISC boxes you are comparing. However, this is not as bad as it sounds because this only applies to the CPU portion of the execution and most database applications are I/O rather than CPU bound so that even with a 3X hit (and that value is getting better all the time) the actual execution impact may be very small --- and may even be reduced to less than zero by the overall gains in I/O.

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Tony Drake_2 — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 12:20:22 GMT

We are running Oracle 9.2.x in Native Itanium mode.

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Jean-Luc Oudart — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 12:34:27 GMT

Tony

you could check the intel site such as http://www.intel.com/products/benchmarks/server/index2.htm

but it does not say much.

I suppose the best would be to benchmark your own application on both platform.

Regards
Jean-Luc

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Tony Drake_2 — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 12:53:16 GMT

Thats interesting info Jean Luc.

I was hoping someone had some concrete tests that they had done already in the real world.

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Geoff Wild — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 13:04:23 GMT

Attached is the "Oracle9i migration from PA-RISC to Itanium" doc.

Some stats in there.

Rgds...Geoff

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Geoff Wild — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 13:05:19 GMT

And another whitepaper "Evolving your HP-UX environments from PA-RISC to the IntelR"

Rgds...Geoff

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Indira Aramandla — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 21:11:11 GMT

Hi Tony,

Metalink Note:266220.1 â Migration from HP PA-RISC (64bit) to HP Itanium ia64â explains the migration steps and performance.

There is no special conversion being made when moving an Oracle database between PA-RISC and the Itanium architecture. The database structures and the database block layout are identical to PA-RISC, so when you move your PA-RISC database to the Itanium architecture, the database engine has no knowledge of the fact that it is operating on data that was created on another platform. There would be no noticeable performance benefit from going through the process of recreating your database natively on the Itanium-based system.

Attached is a document of laboratory performance comparisons Oracle 9.2 environments (PA-RISC vs.Itanium architecture).

In

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Tony Drake_2 — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 21:40:57 GMT

Let me clarify what I am asking about.

I am fully aware of the fact that the native databases and the migrated databases are similar in performance. What I want to know is what is the comparison between the database on the PA RISC vs. the database on Itanium Server.

The HP benchmarks use IBM PowerPC processors.

I know that Itanium is faster than PA_RISC.

What I want to know is how much faster.

So if I have a database query that takes 10 minutes on a PA RISC, would it take 5 minutes on an Itanium? I realize this is simplistic, but I would like to know where to set expectations.

That is the kind of thing I am looking for.

Thanks for all your posts.

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Julio Yamawaki — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 12:32:49 GMT

Hi,

I installed a rx-2600 with 800 MHz Itanium with Oracle 9.2.0.2 and about 120 users.
I installed a rp-3410 with 800 MHz PA-8800 with Oracle 9.2.0.0 and about 100 users.
Some key issues:
1. Oracle installation: 15 minutes in Itanium, 23 minutes in PA-RISC
2. Import: 50 GB base in Itanium: 2,5 hours, 45 GB in PA-Risc: 3 hours
All disks area 15K rpm, 3 GB memory in each case.
So, my conclusion is that Oracle in Itanium has more performance than in PA-Risc.

Regards,

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Tony Drake_2 — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 12:37:59 GMT

Thanks. That's great.

If anyone else has any similar numbers I'd like to see them.

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Steven E. Protter — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 12:47:21 GMT

Reality check:

Julio Yamawaki, conclusion should be "comparable"

The speed of the i/o on the bus on those two systems may be different, as the system boards are different.

Based on the fact that the data loads are not the same size, the test can not conclude that either platform is faster.

SEP

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Tony Drake_2 — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 13:22:20 GMT

I realize the differences Steven. Although the two systems are not completely identical, and there are differences between ITanium and PA RISC system boards, this does tell me that the two are just that, comparable.

I intend to do some benchmarking of our own, but I wanted to see if anyone had any data so I would know what to expect.

Thanks.
Tony

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Geoff Wild — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 14:09:51 GMT

I was told by our account rep, that on comparable servers (PARISC to Itanium ), that you could half the cpus and get about the same performance.

IE: 4 X CPU RP about the same as 2 X CPU RX....

I have not seen any stats to validate this....

RGds...Geoff

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Hein van den Heuvel — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 14:43:09 GMT

The 'best' PA is pretty close to a lowest IPF.
A recent box with (1.5 or 1.6 Ghz, 9Mb cache) Itanium can often double the performance when replacing a somewhat older PS system with the same mount of processors.

One proof point

http://www50.sap.com/benchmark/sd2tier.asp -->
All 8-way SMP, Oracle 9i, HPUX 11i. All tests in a few months time span, and by the same team so rather compareable.

Date-------SD Users---Model
01/12/2004 1240 rp4440, PA-8800 1.0 GHz
09/12/2003 1500 rx7620, Intel Itanium 2, 1.5 GHz
04/29/2004 1320 rx4640-8, 4 HP mx2 dual 1.1 GHz Itanium

http://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results.asp?orderby=hardware

07/30/03 541,674 64* HP PA-RISC 8700 875MHz
11/04/03 1,008,144 64*Intel Itanium2 1.5GHz

hth,
Hein.

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Alzhy — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 15:00:29 GMT

Interesting SAP benchmarks Hein.

It looks like an 8-way PA8800 1.0Ghz performed at par with an 8-way Intanium2 boxen when doing the SAP benchmarks:

http://www50.sap.com/benchmark/pdf/cert0104.pdf
http://www50.sap.com/benchmark/pdf/cert3704.pdf

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Geoff Wild — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 15:30:23 GMT

Actually, Nelson's compares Windoze to HP-UX - different classes RX76xx to RP44xx

This is better:

4way Itanium, HPUX, RX4640
http://www50.sap.com/benchmark/pdf/cert3004.pdf

to a

8way PARISC, HPUX, RP4440
http://www50.sap.com/benchmark/pdf/cert0104.pdf

Performance very close...

Rgds...Geoff

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Steven E. Protter — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 15:37:07 GMT

As I also forgot to mention.

800 Megahertz on PA-RISC is not the same as 800 Megahertz on Itanium.

RISC has different(reduced) Instruction set.

SEP

Re: oracle itanium vs. pa-risc performance

Florian Heigl (new acc) — Thu, 13 Jan 2005 17:26:58 GMT

Steven - I think the Itanium is a risc cpu, are You sure it isn't?

(I don't like it anyway. Currently at our site it's ~500/4 hppa/ipf and it's good that way.)