JBoss Data Grid v Terracotta BigMemory

Introduction

I am currently working on a technical white paper that details the performance of a number of JBoss Data Grid configurations using RadarGun. While working on it, I found out that Terracotta published a technical white paper covering BigMemory performance here. I decided to create a JBoss Data Grid / RadarGun configuration using the same parameters as the Terracotta BigMemory performance test, and execute it on my performance testing hardware.

Performance Test

The performance test is executed in two phases. During the warm up phase, the cache is populated with entries. The size of each entry value is 4K (4,096 bytes). The Terracotta test populated the cache with 64GB of values while the JBoss test populated the cache with 64.125GB of values. During the test phase, read / write operations are executed with a 9 to 1 ratio for 15 minutes.

SUMMARY

• 4K (4,096 bytes) Values
• 64GB / 64.125GB of Values
• Read / Write Ratio of 9:1
• 15 Minute Duration

Hardware

The Terracotta BigMemory performance test was executed on a single HP DL980 G7 server with 8 Intel Xeon E7-4870 processors. The JBoss Data Grid performance test was executed on 8 HP DL360 G7 servers with 2 Intel Xeon E5620 processors per server.

The Intel Xeon E7-4870 is a 10 core processor with a recommended customer price of $4394 while the Intel Xeon E5620 is a 4 core processor with a recommended customer price of $391. The Terracotta server costs $100,097 while the JBoss servers cost $28,280 ($3,535 * 8).

PRICING NOTES

• The JBoss HP DL360 G7 servers were configured with 500GB SATA 7.2K hard disk drives and 16GB of memory (2x 8GB).
• While the Terracotta HP DL980 G7 was configured with 2TB of memory, it was priced with 128GB of memory (64x 2GB) because that is the total amount of memory configured for the JBoss HP DL360 G7 servers.
• All of the servers were priced without support and installation.

SUMMARY

Results

Throughput

Conclusion

Despite Terracotta BigMemory having a significant hardware advantage, this match ended with a knockout (KO) in the first round after JBoss Data Grid landed a blow connecting on performance.

Replay

The configuration files for JBoss Data Grid and RadarGun are available for download. In addition, the performance test was executed with my fork of RadarGun.

https://github.com/shane-k-j/radargun

I will issue a pull request when I have finished my technical white paper.