AMD Opteron 248 vs. Intel Xeon 2.8: 2-way Web Servers go Head to Head

The Web Application Server Test Environment

With a web application server in place, we needed an application to put under load. We used FuseTalk Enterprise (http://www.fusetalk.com) as our web application as it’s written for ColdFusion MX and is based on the component architecture that most enterprise level applications consist of.

To put FuseTalk under load, we used WAS (Web Application Stress Tool), a free tool released by Microsoft that can record a user’s interaction with a web application and play it back as fast or as slow as required. We used a 200-user load and didn’t record any delay between requests. ColdFusion was set up to process 20 simultaneous threads, a number derived from CPU load. WAS was also set to deliver a maximum of 20 threads to ColdFusion at a time. The main goal was to simulate heavy load on the server in order to bring out differences between the platforms compared.

Once the application was under load, we recorded how long the hardware took to process a page from when the application server starts processing the template to when it hands it off to the client. Some web tests record from when the client requests the page to when the client receives the data. We think that method is flawed when testing how hardware impacts the performance of an Application server. When testing web application server performance as it relates to hardware, you want to remove as many bottlenecks and variables as possible. If you measure how long it took to deliver the data to the client, you are relying on consistent network performance. Network performance can be a variable based on data collision and many other factors.