MIMIC 10.30 Performance Test Report: High-scalability (64-bit) Linux bakeoff

FYI, we have published a new MIMIC SNMP Simulator 10.30 Performance Report

"High scalability (64-bit) for 9 Linux distributions on quad-CPU Sunfire V40z"

This report is part of a series meant to answer the question "which combination of hardware
and software performs the best for a particular SNMP simulation scenario?".

The summary is:
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This report compares MIMIC 10.30 running 64-bit mode under 9 different Linux distributions
on a quad CPU AMD Opteron 850 2.4 GHz Sunfire V40z:

1.Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS release 4
2.Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server 5.5
3.CentOS 5.2
4.Fedora Core 6
5.Fedora 7
6.Fedora 9
7.Fedora 10
8.Fedora 11
9.Fedora 12

The 32-bit and 64-bit executables have comparable performance on all tested platforms
(within single-digit percentage difference with minor exceptions). We focused on the low
range (10 to 1,000 agent configurations) in a previous report. In this report we focus on
high-scalability (2,000 to 20,000 agents) requirements which can only be handled with the
64-bit distribution of MIMIC.

In summary, the best overall performer is RedHat Enterprise Linux AS4. RHEL4 substantially
outperforms all other tested distributions in the mid-range (2,000 to 5,000 agents). At the
high-end (8,000 to 20,000 agents), 2nd place goes to Fedora 10, followed by Fedora 9 and
Fedora Core 6, with the remaining distributions trailing badly. Unfortunately we are noticing
that newer releases of Fedora are performing worse in this test.