Performance Tuning Siebel Software on the Sun Platform

7.1 <strong>Tuning</strong> Solaris OS for <strong>Siebel</strong> Server
7.1.1 Solaris MTmalloc <strong>Tuning</strong> for <strong>Siebel</strong>
The alternate memory allocator module, which is standard to the Solaris OS and was
built specifically for multithreaded applications such as <strong>Siebel</strong>, was enabled on the <strong>Siebel</strong>
application servers. The MTmalloc routines provide a faster, concurrent malloc
implementation. This feature resulted in lowering CPU consumption by 35%. Though
memory consumption doubled as a side effect, overall price/performance benefits were
positive. In Solaris 10 OS, improvements have been made on MTmalloc to reduce the
space-inefficiency cost.
Effect of MTmalloc on CPU Benefit and Memory Cost
Figure 7.1.1
In Figure7.1.1, the blue curve shows the percentage reduction in CPU usage for <strong>Siebel</strong>
applications running on different Sun Fire SMP machines with MTmalloc enabled . The
red curve shows the corresponding increase in memory usage due to use of MTmalloc.
As is apparent from Figure 7.1.1, enabling MTmalloc on a 4 CPU machine will not be
beneficial; there is 51% increase in memory usage by <strong>Siebel</strong> while CPU utilization
remains the same. <strong>Performance</strong> gains begin to get better when MTmalloc is used on
<strong>Siebel</strong> server running on 8 CPU machines and upwards. On an 8 CPU machine (V890)
one can expect 28% reduction in CPU utilization when using the MTmalloc feature.
Though memory usage by the <strong>Siebel</strong> application increases when MTmalloc is tuned,
<strong>Performance</strong> <strong>Tuning</strong> <strong>Siebel</strong> <strong>Software</strong> on the Sun Platform Page 21