The other day a customer asked me to do capacity planning for their web server farm. I was looking at the CPU graph for one of the web servers that had Hyper-threading switched ON and thought to myself: “This must be quite a misleading graph – it shows 30% CPU usage. It can’t really be that this server can handle 3 times more work?”

Or can it?

I decided to do what we usually do in such case – I decided to test it and find out the truth. Turns out – there’s more to it than meets the eye.

How Intel Hyper-Threading works

Before we get to my benchmark results, let’s talk a little bit about hyper-threading. According to Intel, Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology (Intel® HT Technology) uses processor resources more …

This blog post was inspired by my visit at the annual Zabbix Conference in Riga, Latvia this year, where I gave a couple of talks on MySQL and beyond.

It was a two day single-track event with some 200 participants, a number of interesting talks on Zabbix (and related technologies) and really well-organized evening activities. I was amazed how well organized the event was and hope to be invited to speak there next year as well.   (Just in case you’re not sure what Zabbix is, it is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution for networks and applications)

I must secretly confess, it was also the first conference …