Analysis of Google patches on 4,8 and 12 cores

One of the goals we had originally with the MySQL 5.4
development was to improve scaling from 4 cores to
8 cores. So in my early testing I ran comparisons of
the Google SMP + IO + tcmalloc patches on 4, 8 and 12
cores to see how it behaved compared with a stock
MySQL 5.1.28 version (Note the comparison here was
done on a very early version of 5.4, 5.4.0 have a
set of additional patches applied to it).



What we can see here is that the Google SMP patch and use
of tcmalloc makes a difference already on a 4-core server
using 4 threads. On 1 and 2 threads the difference is only
on the order of 1-2% so not really of smaller significance.

An interesting note in the graph is that 8-core numbers using
the Google improvements outperform the 12-core stock MySQL
5.1.28.

So what we concluded in those graphs is that the scaling from 4-cores
to 8-cores had improved greatly and that there also was a good scaling
from 8 cores to 12 cores. This improvement increased even more with
the 5.4 release. The main purpose of showing these numbers is to show
the difference between 4, 8 and 12 cores.

All benchmarks were executed on a 16-core x86 box with 4 cores
dedicated to running sysbench.