The Linux TPC results and kernel changes

HP has recently been trumpeting its results running the TPC-C benchmark with Oracle on Linux. Slightly better performance than that achieved with Windows is claimed. What may be more interesting is this note posted to the linux-kernel list on what HP did to its kernel to achieve those results. The kernel that ran the benchmark had a few patches:

• Asynchronous I/O. Apparently using AIO improved performance by about 5%.

• Large pages. Going to 2MB pages (i.e. using the large page patch that went into 2.5.36) improved performance by 8%.

The benchmark also made extensive use of high memory (16GB worth), direct I/O, and a number of other recent kernel features.

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