Why Multi-core Hardware Upgrades Can Slow Your Application
Since the start of the personal computing revolution one of the things application vendors could count on was that new hardware made applications faster. Disk, memory, bus, processors - always more and always faster. Application developers typically didn’t need to do anything - if the application ran on the OS and the OS ran on the new hardware, the application ran faster.
Until now. Multi-core is the next evolution in computing performance. Single core clock speeds maxed out. Putting more cores on a single processor seems like a straightforward way to deliver big performance increases. No problem, except for two things: managing multiple cores creates some significant overhead and most applications require nontrivial re-engineering to parallelize the code and take advantage of more than one core. In other words, without some significant work there are some applications that will run slower on multi-core systems. This is not the result a customer with a shiny new server will expect or understand.
Problem Solved: Pervasive PSQL v11
Here’s the good news: we’ve designed Pervasive PSQL v11 MC specifically to smooth over any bumps you may have transitioning your application to a multi-core world.
Pervasive PSQL v11 has been designed to provide parallel threads performing similar activities, allowing the database to engage multiple cores during task execution. PSQL v11 provides enhancements to the low-level synchronization mechanisms in the transactional interface. Multiple users can read the same cached file pages simultaneously and their operations can proceed on independent cores. Non-user activity such as checkpoints and log management can also run on separate cores. Also, many of bottlenecks in the database engine have been reduced or removed. For example, multiple users accessing independent files can proceed on different cores. This allows the database engine to handle higher loads with less overhead, resulting in steadier throughput. Not only is multi-core operation significantly improved, but database performance increases as cores are added.