Database test: Intel Xeon 'Clovertown' X5355

PostgreSQL tends to be the good boy in the classroom in our tests when it comes to scaling behaviour, and this review is no exception. After the messy diagrams of MySQL it is a relief to see the straight lines of PostgreSQL that run according to what might be expected: up to four cores, the 2.66GHz Clovertown is a little slower than the 3.0GHz Woodcrest, and we see that the performance of a single quad-core is just a little below that of a double quad-core. However, pitted against two quad-cores, Woodcrest doesn't hold up and we break the 750 requests per second barrier for the first time. On average, heavy loads make Melrow's Clovertown machine 19% faster than the current database server of our forum, GoT. Although the result is clearly better than those achieved with MySQL, it is a little meagre when the price difference is taken into consideration, as well the higher TDP and the average gains that we saw in other benchmarks.

Fully loaded, the server consumes 355 Watts. On average, the use of PostgreSQL allowed 448.726 pages to be served in ten minutes, making for a performance/Watt ratio of 1264. Unfortunately, there's nothing out there yet to compare this to. The results we published earlier were obtained using an older version of the Linux kernel, while the new one is clearly better. A coarse estimate based on figures that we do have indicates that Clovertown will probably offer slightly better performance per Watt than the 2.66GHz dual-core.