Re: Speed comparisons: P9 vs P10

No question that VIOS does badly with internal storage, that added overhead is far greater than IBM i hosting IBM i.

While there is a small performance penalty for IBM i hosting, it’s a great solution to many customers that don’t have the infrastructure for multiple partitions but have the storage/memory/processor to spare to build one.

Virtualization is a great tool.


Jim Oberholtzer
Agile Technology Architects

On Jul 10, 2024, at 7:49 AM, Rob Berendt <robertowenberendt@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

We tried using VIOS to virtualize internal disks and it was so bad that we
initialized the system and started over. Granted that was a few Power
systems ago. I think the general rule of thumb is use VIOS to virtualize
SAN based storage but not for internal storage.

Power 9 Hosting partition:
Resource Type-model Status Text
DC03 57B1-001 Operational Storage Controller
D11 78D1-001 Operational Device Services
DMP011 5B11-101 Operational Disk Unit
...
We have four 57B1's. Each with 24 of those drives.
It has three NWSDs. One is for optical. The other two have four 280GB
storage spaces each.

To the guest supporting Domino these appear as eight drives
Resource Type-model
DC02 290A-001
DD001 6B22-050
DD002 6B22-050
DD003 6B22-050
DD018 6B22-050
DC05 290A-001
DD011 6B22-050
DD012 6B22-050
DD013 6B22-050
DD019 6B22-050

On Wed, Jul 10, 2024 at 4:02 AM Yvan Janssens <friedkiwi@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

A few follow-up questions:

On the P9, are the local SSDs SAS or NVMe? The performance difference
between SAS and NVMe is an order of magnitude - 10x-20x isn't uncommon, and
since this is a workload that's primarily I/O bound, better disks makes a
bigger difference than a better CPU. Back in the day, when we were building
the Mono packages for the IBM i OSS repo's we managed to reduce the build
time from ~6 hours for the entire source tree to ~45 minutes when we got
rid of the RAID array with 15kRPM disks and replaced it with SAS SSDs.

Also - bear in mind that two layers of IBM i also adds a performance
penalty; VIOS is much better at virtualising I/O and typically doesn’t run
it's own payloads either.

Another thing I've observed is that IBM i PASE is slow, both compared to
AIX and especially compared to Linux. I've worked a lot with PASE, and
process creation/destruction/forks are very expensive operations compared
to unices or unix-like environments because of the translation layer.

On 09/07/2024, 20:55, "MIDRANGE-L on behalf of Rob Berendt" <
midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:
midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of
robertowenberendt@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:robertowenberendt@xxxxxxxxx>> wrote:


Thought you might enjoy this speed comparison.


Two Domino servers. On different Power systems. They are Domino clusters
which basically replicate the same databases between each.
Dedicated compact completed when the Domino server was not running.


MAIL3: Power 10 9105-41B with VIOS hosted SAN based NVMe drives, 1
processor, 128GB memory
07/08/2024 09:35:41 Compacting QuoteStubArchive.nsf (Group Dekko Quote
Stubs Archive), -c -i -d
07/08/2024 11:31:42 Recovery Manager: Assigning new DBIID for
/GDDATA3/NOTES/DATA/QuoteStubArchive.nsf (need new backup for media
recovery).
07/08/2024 11:31:44 Compacted QuoteStubArchive.nsf, increased by 3584K
bytes (<1%), -c -i -d
Duration: 01:56:03


MAILTWO: Power 9 9009-41A with internal SSD drives, IBM i hosting IBM i.
1.5 processors, 162GB memory
07/09/2024 10:51:28 Compacting quotestubarchive.nsf (Group Dekko Quote
Stubs Archive), -c -i -d
07/09/2024 14:35:40 Recovery Manager: Assigning new DBIID for
/GDDATA2/NOTES/DATA/quotestubarchive.nsf (need new backup for media
recovery).
07/09/2024 14:35:44 Compacted quotestubarchive.nsf, 3840K bytes
recovered (<1%), -c -i -d
Duration: 03:44:16
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