Benchmarks: AMD64 vs i386 on Dual 246 Opteron

[Boleyn, Erich]

ray at redshift.com wrote:

> In the benchmarking I did, even .gif and .jpg files being loaded via Apache were
> negatively impacted under AMD64 vs. i386.  I don't think PHP would be involved
> at that stage - even though I do have PHP statically compiled into Apache. 
> 
> The speed difference between i386 and AMD64 was pretty consistent between .php,
> .gif/jpg loads as well as when handling MySQL stuff (even though it is PHP
> making the MySQL calls, the bottle neck in the MySQL tests appeared to be MySQL,
> not the API language as it were.  And in those cases, the MySQL tests went up by
> around the same factor as the .php and .gif/jpg page loads, so I think it was
> something not directly tied to PHP.  I could be mistaken, but that's the
> impression I got since even non .php stuff went up/down as I changed the OS
> branch during the benchmarking. 

Agreed, that would indicate it's likely the base FreeBSD OS or libraries heavily
used by the above applications (assuming you didn't serve static pages from MySQL
as well and it was not a common factor as it seems from your statement).

Erich Boleyn
CPG Architecture
AMD