[rabbitmq-discuss] [erlang-questions] cheap low-power boards

[Ben Hood]

Martin,

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 1:27 PM, Martin Scholl <ms at diskware.net> wrote:
> Ben Hood wrote:
> [snip]
>> Obviously there are some standard benchmarks such as throughput and
>> latency, but these are generally used to compare different releases
>> against each other.
> I think, latency is more interesting than throughput. I am not really
> familiar with RabbitMQ and its distributed capabilities -- imho it would
> be particularly interesting to see how RabbitMQ scales on these kind of
> embedded stuff (comparing performance/watt with standard hardware).

Sure, but if I was really worried about latency, I don't know if would
go down the embedded route.

> Our results are quite promising:
>
>>
>> Defining what constitutes a benchmark is to an extent a subjective
>> task and hence will depend on what your use case is.
> I am interested in "green computing" and especially results of
> performance / watt ratios of real world scenarios. This is my motivation
> behind all this.

Maybe you could look at an application that does not constantly stress
the middleware - hence having something light weight would not cost
much when it's not doing anything and hence been *greener*. Having
said this, I think this may be a question of how long is a piece of
string -  for example, you could also compare bang for for energy buck
by running virtualized machines.

>> There are not same types of well defined independent benchmarks for
>> messaging systems as there are for SQL databases, for example.
>>
>> Having said this, our benchmarks are part of our standard client
>> library and you could easily install a Rabbit cluster on both sets of
>> hardware and run them yourself.
> Sadly, I do not have the money to buy a NSLU2 just to do the
> benchmarking - therefore I asked you if you have some results at hand.
> I can access e.g. an ATOM board and will happily benchmark and share the
> results, if you could tell me more details on the benchmarking
> methodology you propose.

This is getting a bit more rabbitty (maybe this question should
migrate to the rabbit discussion list? I've cross-posted just in
case).

In the Rabbit client library there is a utility called MulticastMain,
which, if you run it the --help flag, will tell you about all of the
configuration options you have to test latency and throughput from a
client perspective.

HTH,

Ben