October 2008 ~ Creation Zone

The following suggested best practices are applicable to all Siebel deployments on CMT hardware (Tx00, T5x20, T5x40) running Solaris 10 [Note: some of this tuning applies to Siebel running on conventional hardware running Solaris]. These recommendations are based on our observations from the 14,000 user benchmark on Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. Your mileage may vary.

All Tiers

Ensure that the system's firmware is up-to-date.
Upgrade to the latest update release of Solaris 10.
Enable 256M large pages on all nodes. By default, the latest update of Solaris 10 will use a maximum of 4M pages even when 256M pages are a good fit.
Pro-actively avoid running into stdio's 256 file descriptors limitation.
Improve scalability with MT-hot memory allocation library, libumem or libmtmalloc.

To improve the scalability of the multi-threaded workloads, preload MT-hot object-caching memory allocation library like libumem(3LIB), mtmalloc(3MALLOC).
Be aware that the trade-off is the increase in memory footprint -- you may notice 5 to 20% increase in the memory footprint with one of these MT-hot memory allocation libraries preloaded. Also not every Siebel application module benefits from MT-hot memory allocators. The recommendation is to experiment before implementing in production environments.

TCP/IP tunables

Application fared well with the following set of TCP/IP parameters on Solaris 10 5/08.

ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_time_wait_interval 60000
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_conn_req_max_q 1024
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_conn_req_max_q0 4096
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_ip_abort_interval 60000
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_keepalive_interval 900000
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_rexmit_interval_initial 3000
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_rexmit_interval_max 10000
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_rexmit_interval_min 3000
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_smallest_anon_port 1024
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_slow_start_initial 2
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_xmit_hiwat 799744
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_recv_hiwat 799744
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_max_buf  8388608
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_cwnd_max  4194304
ndd -set /dev/tcp tcp_fin_wait_2_flush_interval 67500
ndd -set /dev/udp udp_xmit_hiwat 799744
ndd -set /dev/udp udp_recv_hiwat 799744
ndd -set /dev/udp udp_max_buf 8388608

Siebel Application Tier

All T-series systems (T1000/T2000, T5120/T5220, T5120/T5240, T5440) support the 256M page size. However Siebel's siebmtshw script restricts the page size to 4M. Comment out the following lines in $SIEBEL_HOME/siebsrvr/bin/siebmtshw.
Experiment with less number of Siebel Object Managers.
Try Oracle 11g R1 client in the application-tier. Oracle 10g R2 clients may crash under high load. For the symptoms of the crash, check Solaris/SPARC: Oracle 11gR1 client for Siebel 8.0.

Siebel Database Tier

Eliminate double buffering by forcing the file system to use direct I/O.

Oracle database caches the data in its own cache within the shared global area (SGA) known as the database block buffer cache. Database reads and writes are cached in block buffer cache so the subsequent accesses for the same blocks do not need to re-read the data from the operating system. On the other hand, file systems on Solaris default to reading the data though the global file system cache for improved I/O operations. That is, by default each read is cached potentially twice - one copy in the operating system's file system cache, and the other copy in Oracle's block buffer cache. In addition to double caching, there is also some extra CPU overhead for the code which manages the operating system's file system cache. The solution is to eliminate double caching by forcing the file system to bypass the OS file system cache when reading and writing to the disk.
Store data files separate from the redo log files -- If the data files and the redo log files are stored on the same disk drive and if that disk drive fails, the files cannot be used in the database recovery procedures.
Size online redo logs to control the frequency of log switches.
If the storage array supports the read-ahead feature, enable it. When 'read-ahead enabled' is set to true, the write will be committed to the cache as opposed to the disk, and the OS signals the application that the write has been committed.

Oracle Database Initialization Parameters
Set Oracle's initialization parameter DB_FILE_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT to appropriate value. DB_FILE_MULTIBLOCK_READ_COUNT parameter specifies the maximum number of blocks read in one I/O operation during a sequential scan.
On T5240 and T5440 servers, set the database initialization parameter CPU_COUNT to 64. Otherwise, by default Oracle RDBMS assumes 128 and 256 for the CPU_COUNT on T5240 and T5440 respectively. Oracle's optimizer might use a completely different execution plan when it notices such a large number for the CPU_COUNT; and the resulting execution plan need not necessarily be an optimal one. In the 14,000 user benchmark, setting CPU_COUNT to 64 produced optimal execution plans.
On T5240 and T5440 servers, explicitly set the database initialization parameter _enable_NUMA_optimization to FALSE. On these multi-socket servers, _enable_NUMA_optimization will be set to TRUE by default. During the 14,000 user benchmark run, we noticed intermittent shadow process crashes with the default behavior. We didn't realize any additional gains either with the default NUMA optimizations.

Siebel Web Tier

Upgrade to the latest service pack of Sun Java Web Server 6.1 (32-bit).
Run the Sun Java Web Server in multi-process mode by setting the MaxProcs directive in magnus.conf to a value that is greater than 1. In the multi-process mode, the web server can handle requests using multiple processes with multiple threads in each process.
Tune the maximum simultaneous requests by setting the RqThrottle parameter in the magnus.conf file to appropriate value. A value of 1024 was used in the 14,000 user benchmark.

(Originally posted at: http://blogs.sun.com/mandalika/entry/siebel_on_sun_cmt_hardware) _______________ Technorati Tags:

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Performance Tuning

Recently Sun announced the 14,000 user Siebel 8.0 PSPP benchmark results on a single Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. An Oracle white paper with Sun's 14,000 user benchmark results is available on Oracle's Siebel benchmark web site. The content in this blog post complements the benchmark white paper.

Some of the notes and highlights from this competitive benchmark are as follows:

Key specifications for the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 system under test, are: 4 x UltraSPARC T2 Plus processors, 32 cores, 256 compute threads and 128 GB of memory in a 4RU space.
The entire Siebel 8.0 solution was deployed on a single Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 including the web, gateway, application, and database servers.
Web, Application and the Database servers were isolated from each other by creating three Solaris Containers (non-global zones or local zones) dedicated one each for all those servers.
Siebel Gateway server and the Siebel Application servers were installed and configured in one of the three Solaris Containers. Two identical copies of Siebel Application server instances were configured to handle 7,000 user load by each of those instances.
To keep it simple, the benchmark publication white paper limits itself to an overview of the system configuration. The full details are available in the diagram below.

Topology Diagram

The breakdown of the approximate averages of CPU and memory utilization by each tier is shown below.

Tier CPU Memory
Web 78% 4.50 GB
App 76% 69.00 GB
DB 72% 20.00 GB

System-wide averages are as follows:

Tier CPU Memory
Web + App + DB 82% 93.5 GB
1276 watts is the average power consumption when all the 14,000 concurrent users are in the steady state of the benchmark test. That is, in the case of similarly configured workloads, T5440 supports 10.97 users per watt of the power consumed; and supports 3500 users per rack unit.

Based on the above notes: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 is inexpensive, requires: less power and data center footprint, ideal for consolidation and equally importantly scales well.

Vendor-to-Vendor comparison

How does Sun's new 14,000 user benchmark result compare with the high watermark benchmark results published by other vendors using the same Siebel 8.0 PSPP workload?

Besides Sun, IBM and HP are the only other vendors who published benchmark results so far with the Siebel 8.0 PSPP benchmark workload. IBM's highest user count is 7,000; where as 5,200 is HP's. Here is a quick comparison of the throughputs based on the results published by Sun, IBM and HP with the highest number of active users.

Sun Microsystems' 14,000 user benchmark on a single T5440 outperformed:

IBM's 7,000 user benchmark result by 1.9x
HP's 5,200 user benchmark result by 2.5x
Sun's own 10,000 user benchmark result on a combination of 2 x T5120 and 2 x T5220s by 1.4x

From the operating system perspective, Solaris outperformed AIX, Windows Server 2003 and HP-UX. Linux is nowhere to be found in the competitive landscape.

A simple comparison of all the published Siebel 8.0 benchmark results (as of today) by all vendors justifies the title of this blog post. As IBM and HP do not post the list price of all of their servers, I am not even attempting to show the price/performance comparison in here. On the other hand, Sun openly lists out all the list prices at store.sun.com web site.

CAUTION

Although T5440 possesses a ton of great qualities, it might not be suitable for deploying workloads with heavy single-threaded dependencies. The T5440 is an excellent hardware platform for multi-threaded, and moderately single-threaded/multi-process workloads. When in doubt, it is a good idea to leverage Sun Microsystems' Try & Buy program to try the workloads on this new and shiny T5440 before making the final call.

I would like to share the tuning information from the OS and the underlying hardware perspective for couple of reasons -- 1. Oracle's benchmark white paper does not include any of the system specific tuning information, and 2. it may take quite a bit of time for Oracle Corporation to update the Siebel Tuning Guide for Solaris with some of the tuning information that you find in here.

Check the second part of this blog post for the best practices running Siebel on Sun CMT hardware.

(Originally posted at:
http://blogs.sun.com/mandalika/entry/siebel_8_0_on_sun)
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