Hi,
I am in the process of qualifying some hardware to run Observium (planning to deploy it in about 25 locations).
So I was trying to evaluate the hardware we currently have which consist of Dell R610 and IBM X3550. So we can gauge what we need.
The R610 has : - 2x Intel X5660 (6 cores 2.8Ghz + hyperthreading) == total of 12 physical cores and 24 logical - 96Gb of DDR3 1333Mhz - 6x300GB 10K SAS configured as one raid1 of 2 disks for mysql and OS and a raid5 of 4 disks for rrds. - 1Gb network interface
The X3550 has : - 2x Intel L5420 (4 cores 2.5Ghz) == total of 8 physical cores - 32Gb of DDR2 266Mhz - 2x200Gb 7.5K SATA configured as one for mysql and OS and one for rrds - 1 Gb network interface
So reading this, it seems easy to guess which one should be faster.
I am currently testing using : Observium CE 0.15.6.6430 OS Linux 2.6.32-358.14.1.el6.x86_64 [amd64] (CentOS 6.2) Apache 2.2.15 (CentOS) PHP 5.6.11 Python 2.6.6 MySQL 5.6.26-log SNMP NET-SNMP 5.5 RRDtool 1.4.9
From my testing, the poller perform a quite better on the R610 than on the X3550 : Polling the same 310 linux boxes (The slowest devices taking around 35 seconds) this gives an average of : - 8 threads : R610 : 169 seconds X3550 : 213 seconds - 12 threads : R610 : 69 seconds X3550 : 156 seconds - 24 threads R610 : 41 seconds X3550 : 107 seconds - 36 threads R610 : 41 seconds X3550 : 160 seconds - 64 threads R610 : 37 seconds X3550 : 225 seconds - 96 Threads R610 : 40 seconds X3550 : Still running
Ok we clearly have a winner here. Bottom line for the poller, you can come close to the time taken by your slowest devices if you add more threads. But it seems that you need quite a few cores available to be able to increase the number of threads without decreasing the efficiency.
This was kind of expected.
Where the thing becomes weird it's on the web interface and especially the graph rendering : On average starting with a clear cache, the same Linux device page render (graphs included) consistently in about 1 second on the X3550 and in about 4 seconds on the R610 (screenshot attached).
Where it became even worse : if you ask the X3550 to connect to the mysql database of the R610 and export the rrds of the R610 over NFS ... the X3550 still render the page faster (still around 1 second).
Any guess on what is going on here ? It doesn't seem right that a machine that is definitely faster accessing mysql and updating rrds would be 4 times slower when rendering graphs.
Best regards, Louis
