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AS/400 leads the league in Java performance

IBM's AS/400 server rocks the house in two Java benchmarks

By John Carr, InfoWorld, 08/11/00

Some people still view IBM's AS/400 as merely a character-based legacy platform, but that's light-years from today's reality. The AS/400's glittering appearance at several recent Java benchmark parties was reminiscent of Cinderella's transformation and arrival at the ball. Stepping in quietly from the background, the AS/400 sparkled amid its Java rivals at the Volano, Specjbb2000, and other recent benchmark galas.

TEXTBOX:

TEXTBOX_HEAD: The Bottom Line

AS/400 Java performance

Business Case
Recent benchmarking of Java performance on the newest release of the AS/400 has proven the platform a stellar performer compared to rivals. This helps make the AS/400 an ideal platform for e-business deployments.

Technology Case
The AS/400 performed an incredible 108,153 messages per second during the VolanoMark test (a chat room emulator) and 80,348 operations per second during the Specjbb2000 benchmark (an order entry test), leaving no doubt that the AS/400 can handle Java's requirements.

Pros

• Extremely fast Java performance
• Offers major performance gain over rival platforms
• Strong support for Java applications

Cons Investment in higher-end AS/400 configuration may be required to process higher transaction volume.

:END_TEXTBOX

The AS/400 always has had a well-respected, though drab, image as a business computer suited to the unglamorous tasks of billing customers, tracking inventory, and balancing the company books. Meanwhile, its stepsisters and other competitors stepped in and grabbed the limelight, at least until now.

If the results of these benchmarks are any indication of how well the AS/400 can perform in a Java-based, Web-serving, e-commerce world, then CTOs and other business leaders should be taking a hard look at the AS/400 as a platform to reliably host their e-business applications.

IBM's AS/400 seemed to arrive at the Java benchmark parties already wearing Cinderella's glass slippers. Running its latest operating system release, OS/400 Version 4, Release 5 (V4R5), it became the first server platform ever to post a six-digit number in the VolanoMark 2.1.2 Java benchmark.

The model tested was a 24-way processor AS/400E Model 840 with 4GB of memory. The configuration clocked an amazing 108,153 messages per second with 200 concurrent connections. This test score was four times the 25,131 messages per second posted by Sun Microsystems for its Solaris E6500 22-way processor server with 30GB of memory).

Volano's VolanoMark benchmark is a 100% pure Java benchmark that emulates a chat room by using long-lasting connections and high thread counts (for more information, see Resources). Clients take turns broadcasting their messages to the group. The benchmark reports the average number of messages transferred by the server per second.

Table 1. VolanoMark 2.1.2 benchmark results

AS/400 Model 840 V4R5 12-way configuration, 8 GB memory
Connections	Messages per second
400	43,292
3,000	42,863
6,000	42,105
9,000	39,529
12,000	39,129
15,000	36,125
18,000	25,587
20,000	23,942
Solaris E6500 22-way configuration, 30 GB memory
Connections	Messages per second
6,000	6,830
9,000	4,847

The most impressive result was a 12-way AS/400 configuration that achieved 23,942 messages per second with an unheard of 20,000 concurrent connections. Nothing else has come close to that score. Also amazing is that the 12-way messages per second remained nearly the same as it scaled up from 400 concurrent connections to beyond 12,000.

For more enterprise computing news, visit InfoWorld. Story copyright InfoWorld Media Group, Inc.

 

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