How I tested

My tests were designed to compare performance of 64-bit Windows Server 2003 and SQL Server 2000 on Intel Itanium to 32-bit versions of the same software on Intel Xeon hardware. IBM supplied both systems. The 32-bit system was an IBM eServer X-Series 335 with two 3.06GHz Xeon DP processors and 512KB of L2 cache. The 64-bit system was an IBM eServer X-Series 450 with two 1.5GHz Itanium 2 DP processors with 256KB of L2 and 1.5MB of L3 cache. MPC ClientPro 545 Pentium 4 PCs served as the test clients. The systems were stitched together via a NetGear GS108 full-duplex Gigabit Ethernet switch.

I used a combination of off-the-shelf tools and custom scripts to create the nearly 70 unique workload combinations that made up my 64-bit test methodology. These included the CSA Research Benchmark Studio  simulation and testing framework (for two- and three-tier client/server workloads) and a simple DTS (Data Transformation Services) execution shell I cobbled together using Microsoft Visual Studio Enterprise Edition 6.0.

For the two-tier scenarios, I used Benchmark Studio’s ADO Stress workload simulator to drive OLE DB and ODBC-based transactions against both of the IBM eServers. I began with a single simulated client session and then gradually scaled the workload to include additional clients and an increasingly larger data set. In addition to varying the ActiveX Data Objects provider, I also experimented with different combinations of network libraries (TCP/IP vs. Named Pipes) and transaction support (read, write, read/write, and none). Finally, I varied the read/write ratio for the workloads, beginning with a lightweight (single client) scenario with read-only transactions (no write operations) to a more demanding (10 clients) simulation with 100 percent of the transaction data written back into the database.

The three-tier scenarios mimicked the two-tier tests, except that the workload generation tasks were handled by an Active Server Pages script running directly on the server. I used the ASP Stress module of Benchmark Studio to simulate from five to 50 concurrent Web browser connections, each driving a separate session of the ASP script (adostress.asp).

My bulk data manipulation tests involved a set of four custom DTS (Data Transformation Services) packages encompassing simple import, copy, and query functions. The packages were run against a source database of 4.2 million records spanning three tables and including a variety of data types (text, integer, floating point, and date/time).