Barry on WordPress

We are looking at switching some of our servers from AMD Opteron Barcelona quad-core processors to the new Intel 5520 Nehalem processors. These are both 4 core CPUs, but the Intels utilize hyper-threading, so the OS sees 8 cores per CPU.  It wasn’t that long ago that the first thing you did with a hyper-threading-enabled CPU was switch it off in the BIOS, but I have heard good things about Intel’s reincarnation of hyper-threading, so I decided to give it a shot.  

I ran some real-world stress tests against these servers, adding them into the WordPress.com web pool and seeing how many requests per second they could serve before becoming 100% CPU bound effectively falling over. The types of requests served are varied; a lot are rendering web pages, but there are also quite a few image resizing operations thrown in here as well, as we spread this image work evenly over the 2500 cores in our web tier.  Everything is php executed via fastcgi.  I was a bit skeptical that there would be much of a difference between the two processors, but the numbers proved me wrong — the Nehalem’s are impressive.

2 x AMD Opteron 2356 Barcelona Quad-core 2.3Ghz
40 requests/second at 87.5% CPU utilization

2 x Intel 5520 Nehalem Quad-core 2.26Ghz
78 requests/second at 94% CPU utilization

Few things that I thought were interesting:

• On a per request basis, there isn’t much of a difference between the two. They both generate a given page in roughly the same amount of time.
• As CPU utilization approaches 100%, The Intel’s scale rather linearly, while the AMDs seem to struggle over the 85% range.
• The load averages were pretty high during these tests (35+ on the Intel box), but request times didn’t seem to suffer.

Has anyone else seen the same sort of results or maybe something to the contrary?   These 2 configurations are roughly the same price, making it seem like a no-brainer to choose the Intels for web applications.