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Why demonstrate 3 million TPC-C?
There's a transaction-processing benchmark, results listed at www.tpc.org, for which major computer manufacturers are prepared to spend millions of dollars of engineering time and use tens of millions of dollars worth of hardware.
The current top entries are offering rates of a couple of million transactions per minute, which translates to between one and two trillion transactions a year since there are almost exactly half a million minutes in a year.
I've just looked at ebay's financial statements, which indicate that 2.5 billion items are sold through ebay annually; if we assume that each bid is a transaction and that each item gets twenty bids, that's a hundred thousand transactions a minute.
Tesco's sales are on the order of £40 billion a year; even if we assume that each item on a bill is a transaction, the average Tesco item cost more than 50p, so that's less than 80 billion transactions a year, 160,000 a minute. Wal-Mart has about five times the sales of Tesco, which brings you to half a trillion; a million a minute.
What exactly is the point to IBM or to HP of demonstrating a single machine capable of handling all the transactions at every supermarket in the European Union? This seems the kind of machine of which they can sell one.
The current top entries are offering rates of a couple of million transactions per minute, which translates to between one and two trillion transactions a year since there are almost exactly half a million minutes in a year.
I've just looked at ebay's financial statements, which indicate that 2.5 billion items are sold through ebay annually; if we assume that each bid is a transaction and that each item gets twenty bids, that's a hundred thousand transactions a minute.
Tesco's sales are on the order of £40 billion a year; even if we assume that each item on a bill is a transaction, the average Tesco item cost more than 50p, so that's less than 80 billion transactions a year, 160,000 a minute. Wal-Mart has about five times the sales of Tesco, which brings you to half a trillion; a million a minute.
What exactly is the point to IBM or to HP of demonstrating a single machine capable of handling all the transactions at every supermarket in the European Union? This seems the kind of machine of which they can sell one.
no subject
Like a lot of other aging benchmarks, the exact numbers become meaningless, but it is still useful as a guide for comparing OLTP performance between vendors. That said, it's now so old that even that purpose is quite eroded, but as yet there's nothing really better (excluding possibly some of the SAP benchmarks, but they've the problem of being tied to a single software vendor).
http://www.tpc.org/tpce/tpc-e.asp is the discussion document on a suggested replacement for TPC-C
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no subject
In a previous job, I've benchmarked on a 32-way p590. That was targeted at telco billing, and one such server would be a realistic platform for a medium to large mobile telco operating in a country like UK, Germany or France.
Another way to look at it is that the current dual-core quad Opteron systems are now putting in TPC-C results comperable to the top-end results of 6 years ago (e.g. 32-way Alpha 21264). What people do with the capacity expands to meet what's available.
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Information on the 'Small Business Transaction Benchmark(TM)' can be found at http://www.worlds-fastest.com. Click on the link 'Transaction Benchmark Tests'. My 'standard configuration' tests place limits on the machine configuration with identical O/S, tuning, application software, memory size and disk drives.