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Re: Performance gain from v1 to v3

 
Trojan36
Frequent Advisor

Performance gain from v1 to v3

Can anyone tell me the approximate percentage gain in going from HP-UX v1 to v3? I am using the PA8800 CPUs. Any documentations detailing any performance gain would be helpful also. Thx in advance.
9 REPLIES 9
A. Clay Stephenson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Performance gain from v1 to v3

There is no possible answer but "it depends". I suspect that you could actually find cases where the performance degrades. If you have a system that does a lot of cooked i/o, the improvements in buffer-cache and architecture could be significant but there is simply no way to answer your question as you have asked it.
If it ain't broke, I can fix that.
Hein van den Heuvel
Honored Contributor

Re: Performance gain from v1 to v3

>> Can anyone tell me the approximate percentage gain in going from HP-UX v1 to v3?

No.
Unless you want a vague -10% to +20%
It depends too much on your application.
Even adding something like 'oracle based' or 'web serving' is not going to give enough common ground to work from.

Here is a hint though: For starters look for yourself at how much SYSTEM time your application uses versus USERmode.

Kernel/OS changes are rather unlikely to improve usermode time, so if you application is doing 90% usermode, then there is very little hope of significant improvement through OS changes/tuning.
exceptions: - Kernel change could change translation buffer usage and context switing and such making caches more effective, reducing user mode time).
- The DBC was improved which would be system time, but coudl indirectly improve user time (less waiting / spinning / scheduling).

Potential performance gains are a nice side effect of going V3, but should never (rarely) be the deciding factor.
Support for new hardware, new software tools, new certification boundaries, new patches, better support status, those are the real reasons to move forward.
For example, you might for to v3 in preparation of going to more cost effective Itanium hardware. Or maybe a new Oracle release needs a more recent HPUX.

You are right though to keep an eye on performance.
Be sure to have a reproducable, reportable, long term performance overview established under v1 to compare with for v3.
Anything will do, even a crude vmstat script, but seriously look at 'sar' and 'measureware' and commercial tools for comprehensive reporting if you do not already have this in place..

Hope this helps some,
Hein van den Heuvel (at gmail dot com)
HvdH Performance Consulting


Geoff Wild
Honored Contributor

Re: Performance gain from v1 to v3

Here's a page on 11i v3:

http://h20338.www2.hp.com/hpux11i/cache/458092-0-0-225-121.html?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

"HP-UX 11i v3 delivers 30% better operating system performance on average than HP-UX 11i v2. "

Rgds...Geoff
Proverbs 3:5,6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make all your paths straight.
Trojan36
Frequent Advisor

Re: Performance gain from v1 to v3

The 30% performance gain from v1 to v3 is applicable only on Itanium system, not the PA-Risc system.
Geoff Wild
Honored Contributor

Re: Performance gain from v1 to v3

Itanium outperforms parisc from all the benchmarking I have done as well as one of the Oracle dba's we have.

See:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1125744

Rgds...Geoff

BTW - thw 30% increase is from v2 to v3.
Proverbs 3:5,6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make all your paths straight.
Hein van den Heuvel
Honored Contributor

Re: Performance gain from v1 to v3

Trojan36>> The 30% performance gain from v1 to v3 is applicable only on Itanium system, not the PA-Risc system.

Right.
And V2 was really the Itanium V1 release, so that's not too big a surprise. It's the old: First get it working, then get it working well.

Please not though, and I am sure you saw that but just did not copy it exactly, that the text our frien Geoff quotes indicates (Uppercase mine):
"30% better OPERATING SYSTEM performance"

This does not mean your appliaction will go 30% faster. If your vmstat/top/sar looks like usr:sys:idle = 60:20:20, then that 30% _might_ bring you to 60:14:40 for a 10% improvement.

fwiw,
Hein.

Geoff Wild
Honored Contributor

Re: Performance gain from v1 to v3

This article mentions "applications"

http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2183495/hp-server-operating-system

Though they may be just quoting HP's site.

Seriously - if your application does any disk I/O - then upgrading to HP-UX 11i v3 will improve your performance becuase of the re-write of the storage stack - how much? I don't know.

I do know that our lead DBA was very impressed - as our 4 x dual core RX6600 performed on par or better then an Opteron (8 x dual core) running RH Linux. And it beat Solaris hands down.


Rgds...Geoff
Proverbs 3:5,6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make all your paths straight.
Geoff Wild
Honored Contributor

Re: Performance gain from v1 to v3

Here's some more docs:

Unified Cache:

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA0-7157ENW.pdf

This doc has some nice graphs - showing relative performance over previous versions:

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA1-0961ENW.pdf


Here's a doc on the RX6600 and it's world-record SPECjAppServer2004

http://h71028.www7.hp.com/ERC/downloads/4AA1-0961ENW.pdf


Here's a quick blurb on the Mass Storage Stack:

http://docs.hp.com/en/MassStorageStack1/ProductBriefv1.2.pdf

Rgds...Geoff
Proverbs 3:5,6 Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make all your paths straight.
A. Clay Stephenson
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Performance gain from v1 to v3

... but all of this improvement assumes an i/o intensive applications. If this is a computationally intensive application with little i/o such as Finite Element Analysis, Computational Fluid Dynamics, or other simulations the gains may be completely insignificant or unmeasurable. Again, there is no answer except "it depends" to the question as asked. If you want a more precise answer then ask a more precise question.
If it ain't broke, I can fix that.