Storage read/write performance: my work PC vs my $2,000 laptop

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fomoz

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 5, 2012
Messages
394
Hello,

Here's my work PC's HDD read/write:

work_pc_hdd_001.png


Out of curiosity, I decided to compare it to my new laptop that I bought with a $2,000 CAD budget in mind:

Intel520raid0perf002.png


Here are the differences (in x times)
Code: 
Test                		    Read               Write
Seq                                11.36               12.89
512K Random                        19.40               11.15
4K Random                          76.22              147.99
4K QD32 Random                    355.69              899.95
PC specs:
Dell T1500 Workstation
Intel i3 530 @ 2.93GHz (Clarkdale)
8 GB (4x2 GB) DDR3 @ 1333MHz CL9
Seagate Barracuda 250 GB 7200 RPM 8MB SATA 3.0GB/s
Windows 7 Professional

Laptop specs:
MSI GT683
Intel i7 2670QM @ 2.2 to 3.1 GHz (Max Turbo Boost)
32 GB (4x8 GB) DDR3 @ 1600 MHz CL10
2x Intel 520 240 GB RAID-0
Windows 7 Ultimate

I'm running a MySQL server on my work PC. The database has with three MyISAM tables: 4.40 GB, 438 MB, and 69.7 MB. When I dump the database to .sql, its total size is 9 GB. I'm going to setup the same database on my laptop and do some tests on it. The queries that I'm going to run are SELECT, JOIN, and GROUP BY, usually on indexes.

Here's my question: do how much faster do you think it will run on my laptop if I do the same exact queries?

Thanks!
 
Your laptop is a good amount more powerful than your desktop:

i7 vs i3 (HUGE difference)
32GB vs 8 (You could setup a RAM drive for 10GB easy, and it would be CRAZY fast)
and the kicker: You have 2 SSDs (faster than platter HDDs) in RAID 0. If that's hardware RAID, it'll be tough to beat that without a massive platter RAID.
 
Installing programs is slow though. I just finished downloading all the updates for Windows 7 and it look hours to install them. Anyone know why?
 
Most likely thanks to all the .NET updates, they have always been soo time consuming even on the fastest systems.
 
Literally "hours" to install?

On a decent internet connection with an SSD I'd have a hard time believing that they could take more than 20-30 minutes including reboots if you were attentive at any prompts. You didn't get hung up on that stupid IE install where it puts the prompt window to the background did you?
 
.NET and then its hundreds of security updates are really cpu intensive to install....
 
[LYL]Homer;1038558220 said:
Literally "hours" to install?

On a decent internet connection with an SSD I'd have a hard time believing that they could take more than 20-30 minutes including reboots if you were attentive at any prompts. You didn't get hung up on that stupid IE install where it puts the prompt window to the background did you?
Click to expand...
I had to install all the updates leading up to .NET Framework and SP1. It took about 1.5 hours, not including the download time.
 
MistrWebmastr said:
Your laptop is a good amount more powerful than your desktop:

i7 vs i3 (HUGE difference)
32GB vs 8 (You could setup a RAM drive for 10GB easy, and it would be CRAZY fast)
and the kicker: You have 2 SSDs (faster than platter HDDs) in RAID 0. If that's hardware RAID, it'll be tough to beat that without a massive platter RAID.
Click to expand...

This.
I don't know why that's so shocking OP, your laptop has two SSDs vs a single HDD in your work desktop.
 
Red Falcon said:
This.
I don't know why that's so shocking OP, your laptop has two SSDs vs a single HDD in your work desktop.
Click to expand...
It's not surprising, but IMO it's still impressive how you can get this much performance for only $680.
 
How much faster MySQL is going to perform on that laptop has a lot to do with how often the queries are taxing the CPU or having to go to disk for data. THAT in turn has a lot to do with MySQL settings you've got. If you, for instance, have (and I hope you have) enabled the query cache, tend to do a lot of identical or similar queries, then it's probably mostly serving your requests out of RAM already, and a faster CPU & disk will only be an incremental improvement. If you don't have query cache, or your load isn't easily cache-able, OR if you've not got the many, many other MySQL tuning settings set properly, then it's possible it'll be a huge improvement. There's a great script to tell you what you can do to tune MySQL, found here (and I highly recommend it for people using MySQL on Linux): http://mysqltuner.pl/mysqltuner.pl - but you'll probably need to either get cygwin & Perl working properly or run it on a Linux box (or VM) and point it at the Windows machine's MySQL instance (and make sure the Windows MySQL can talk over the network) to get anything out of it, as it was really written for Linux+MySQL. Still, I'd suspect if MySQL is properly tuned, your databases and queries would probably not be overly faster on the better box, simply by virtue of being primarily answered via cache & indexes.
 
With 32GB of RAM it is highly unlikely your MySQL will run into problems. Like the poster above mentions, you will need to optimize MySQL settings, as well as making sure your indexes are set up properly for ideal performance.
 
windows updates are CPU hogs i notice, as said, the .net are awful on CPU and HD.
 
Uhm, apples to oranges..

SO AMAZING!!

SSD vs Non-SSD for MySQL is again Apples to Oranges if your DB can fit in RAM/Cache on both systems.

SSD vs Primed Cache = RAM wins every time for MySQL.

This comparison is stupid, and pointless, it's obvious what the winner will be every time.
 
This thread is like asking "how much faster will this twin turbo porsche circle the same track that I just ran in my Escort?"
 
I've been running a few queries to benchmark my laptop's performance vs my work PC. The result is that it's on average 10 to 12 times faster for most queries I run. Wow.
 
fomoz said:
I've been running a few queries to benchmark my laptop's performance vs my work PC. The result is that it's on average 10 to 12 times faster for most queries I run. Wow.
Click to expand...

Yep, SSDs are a lot more impressive in that kind of work than HDDs.
Thanks for sharing.
 
Wasn't there a forumer doing database stuff on an SSD that showed that it was getting slow over time ? Small files and stuff (especially without trim).
 
With that much RAM on both machines, you probably won't hit the disks much at all with databases of that size. Like others said, tuning your caches and such will go a long way. Most database queries don't really scale that well with multiple CPU's so your desktop shouldn't be too far behind the laptop.
 
you could hit HD, if you set it up wrong, which many many people do!

MySQL and MSSQL do not use multiple threads, it is 1 thread per query, unless you learn to write your queries to run across multiple threads, which is not easy!
 
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