Its been a while anyone talked about Intel’s Hyper-Threading performance when it comes to databases. There were enough posts about disabling Hyper-Threading completely when it comes to MySQL/InnoDB workloads way back when we had enough issues with scalability of InnoDB on multi-core systems. But things has changed quite a bit in the fast year or two in terms of multi-core support (thanks to Innobase/Mark Callaghan/Google and Percona). I still see lot of production servers running with HT disabled completely either in BIOS (append noht to kernel parameter) or manually disabling the CPUs (echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/node/node[0-1]/cpu[2-..]/online ).
Last few week or so; I ran quite a few tests on new production launch with 8-core CPUs and decided to go ahead with HT enabled (along with Intel Turbo mode) as it seems to give close to 15-20% performance gain. Ran tests which are completely InnoDB CPU/memory bound and HT seems to enable much better performance in every test mode. Also tried with different thread schedulers with IO bound loads; still HT seems to give much better results. Especially when most of the workload seems to be with 8-50 threads; and HT seems to give much better boost in that range; so no point to disable HT on production.
I tested both Intel Xeon X5570 and E5530 and here is the test results for CPU bound work load.
As you can also notice; Intel Xeon X series CPUs yield much better results than E series, which is close to $1000 extra, but yields ~15-20% performance for InnoDB workloads. You can find the comparison between these CPUs from Intel. If you are buying any new system for high end performance, always go for X series if there is a chance.
PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN