Oracle 10gR2 RAC on Windows Server x64 and Comparison with RHEL

Recently Performance Tuning compared Oracle 10gR2 RAC on Windows Server 2003 x64 vs. RHEL. You can download the paper from microsoft-oracle.com

The following behavior was observed during testing of the Oracle RAC databases on Red
Hat Enterprise Linux x86_64 and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enter:
Oracle RAC Stress Test
o Transactions Per Minute were roughly equivalent for 2 - 150 user sessions.
o Transactions Per Minute were up to 16% higher for MS Windows for 150
- 250 users.
o CPU usage was above 90% for all of these tests for both Linux and MS
Windows Server.
o The response times for the “New Company Registration” test component
were up to 30% faster for Linux than MS Windows

Oracle RAC User Tests

The response times for the “Order Products” test component were up to
50% faster for MS Windows than Linux, and the response times for the
“Order Products” component increased substantially above 150 users.
o Tablespace I/O throughput for the data and index tablespaces was
approximately 10% higher for Linux at 150 users, but MS Windows I/O
throughput for the data and index tablespaces was approximately 25%
higher at 250 users.
o Tablespace I/O for the TEMP tablespace was very high for Linux at 250
users.
o At 250 users, Linux performed over 30% of sorts on disk instead of sorts
in memory.
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o For all of these tests, Linux used 17% - 40% more memory than MS
Windows Server.

o Transaction Per Minute results were virtually identical for 50 – 2500
users.
o At 3500 users, the Transactions Per Minute for MS Windows were 18%
higher than the Linux Transactions Per Minute.
o At 4000 users, MS Windows Server TPM continued to increase while the
Linux test failed to complete.
o At 2500 users, component response times were 9% - 33% faster for MS
Windows Server; while at 3500 users Windows was faster by a wide
margin.
o At 2500 users, Tablespace I/O throughput is up to 10% higher for Linux,
while at 3500 users, Tablespace I/O throughput is up to 10% higher for
MS Windows Server.
o For all of these tests, Linux used 5% - 25% more memory than MS
Windows Server.
o MS Windows Server showed a gradual increase in page file usage from
1% - 3% as the number of users increased.
o Linux showed an abrupt increase from 0% swap file usage to 13% swap
file usage at 3500 users.