Linux Kernel Comparison: 2.6.4 vs. 2.4.25

Linux Kernel Comparison: 2.6.4 vs. 2.4.25 - Apache Performance
Published on 2004-03-29 01:00:00 By: Jim_

I'm the man working behind the scenes here at 2CPU.com keeping the web server running, so you know I'm keenly interested in Apache performance. To take a look at Apache's static HTML performance, I'll use Apache Bench which is bundled with the source distribution. The test file used was a simple 7KB HTML document with one embedded image. The command used was as follows: /path/to/apache/bin/ab -n 1000 -c 1000 http://localhost/index.html. Where 'n' is the number of requests and 'c' is the number of concurrent users. Let's take a look at my results:

Another shocker! I certainly didn't expect 2.4.25 to win out in this benchmark. I checked and re-checked everything to ensure my results were accurate and each time I ended up with the same outcome. A separation of ~240 requests per second (5% increase) isn't anything to laugh at. This is a surprising loss for 2.6.

After publishing my Linux Hyper-Threading article a kind gentleman contacted me who was willing to assist in the creation of an Apache/PHP/MySQL benchmark. He whipped something together that I could hit with Apache Bench and would stress not only Apache, but PHP and MySQL at the same time. The script runs two SELECT statements on our test database. As I did above, I ran the benchmark specifying 1000 requests and 1000 concurrent users.

Here we see the tide beginning to turn in favor of the latest and greatest from the Linux kernel developers of the world. 2.6.4 ekes out a victory by approximately 5.5% over 2.4.25. Is this an indication of better MySQL performance under kernel 2.6? Well, you'll have to move on to the next page to find that out.

Let's dig into our MySQL-only tests and look at SELECT and UPDATE performance.

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