[Gllug] Painfully slow MySql performance on 64-bit Atom processor

[John Winters]

I've been using a Acer Aspire Revo as a casual development platform for 
a while.  It's very quiet and economical, but occasionally just a bit 
slow.  The processor is an Intel Atom 230 (1.6GHz, single core, 32 bit, 
1G DDR2 RAM) and it runs Debian Squeeze.

I thought it would be nice to have something a spot faster so I recently 
bought a later model.  It has an Intel Atom D525 (1.8GHz, dual core, 
64-bit, 2G DDR3 RAM) and I've installed Debian Squeeze 64 bit on it.

For most purposes the new box seems comfortably snappier, and it can do 
a full Debian kernel compile in 1 hour 40 minutes, compared to just over 
3 hours for the old one.  (Not that I need to compile one - it's just a 
good benchmark and stress test.)

However, the new box is balls-achingly slow at running MySql server 5.1. 
  Loading a dumped rails database into MySql runs at about 1ms per 
record on the old machine, whilst the exact same dump takes an average 
of 44ms per record to load on the new one.

Anyone any suggestions why this might be?  Is 64 bit an "I can do it but 
it's a bit of a party trick" feature of the later Atom processors?

TIA,
John
-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug