AMD's Athlon MP 2100+ vs. Intel's Xeon 2.4GHz - Database Server Comparison

Next up on the test list is our Ad Database Server test bench. All of the ads across AnandTech and the AnandTech Forums are served using e-Zone Media's FuseAds advertising management software. The software was custom tailored to fit our needs and is tightly integrated with our internal content management system. The end result is that the ad placement, rotation, statistics and customization is very flexible and easy to use for our sales staff, however its tight integration with the entire network means that this server is just as important as the content feeding servers. Should the Ad Database be slow to respond or not respond at all because of an overwhelming load, the entire site and forums would slow to a crawl.

Our Ad Database server is actually still running on a slow dual Pentium III 866 machine; our upgrade plans got shifted around a bit as a result of our last upgrade but we will be upgrading the server in the near future. The Ad Database is quite similar to the Web DB but much larger in size, let's see how that changes things:

AnandTech Ad Database Performance Transactions per Second Intel Xeon 2.4GHz x 2 Intel Xeon 2.4GHz x 2 (HT Enabled) AMD Athlon MP 2100+ (1.73GHz) x 2 Athlon MP 2000+ (1.67GHz) x 2 Xeon 2.2GHz x 2 Xeon 2.2GHz x 2 (HT Enabled) Athlon MP 1.2GHz x 2 Intel Xeon 2.2GHz (HT Enabled) Intel Xeon 2.2GHz AMD Athlon MP 2000+ (1.67GHz) Xeon 1.7GHz x 2 AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz Intel Xeon 1.7GHz 669.7 649.4 644.0 643.6 641.1 606.1 597.1 543.9 536.0 528.7 510.9 456.8 401.2 | 0 | 134 | 268 | 402 | 536 | 670 | 80

Just as we noticed last time, Hyper Threading actually hurts performance in this test so the fastest platform is the dual 2.4GHz Xeon with the feature disabled. Unfortunately there's no way for you to know whether Hyper Threading will help or hurt performance without some good old fashioned trial-and-error testing. As we've seen from our internal benchmarks, enabling Hyper Threading doesn't always increase performance in server situations so we'd encourage IT managers to run their own tests under load before assuming that turning it on will yield a performance boost.

The Athlon MP 2100+ does much better in this test, coming within 4% of the dual 2.4GHz Xeon platform.