Oracle's SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle's PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 combined online and batch benchmark achieved a world record 18,000 concurrent users experiencing subsecond response time while executing a PeopleSoft Payroll batch job of 500,000 employees in 32.4 minutes.

• This result was obtained with a SPARC T4-4 server running Oracle Database 11g Release 2, a SPARC T4-4 server running PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 application server and a SPARC T4-2 server running Oracle WebLogic Server in the web tier.

• The SPARC T4-4 server running the application tier used Oracle Solaris Zones which provide a flexible, scalable and manageable virtualization environment.

• The average CPU utilization on the SPARC T4-2 server in the web tier was 17%, on the SPARC T4-4 server in the application tier it was 59%, and on the SPARC T4-4 server in the database tier was 47% (online and batch) leaving significant headroom for additional processing across the three tiers.

• The SPARC T4-4 server used for the database tier hosted Oracle Database 11g Release 2 using Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM) for database files management with I/O performance equivalent to raw devices.

Performance Landscape

Results are presented for the PeopleSoft HRMS Self-Service and Payroll combined benchmark. The new result with 128 streams shows significant improvement in the payroll batch processing time with little impact on the self-service component response time.

The following results are for the PeopleSoft HRMS Self-Service benchmark that was previous run. The results are not directly comparable with the combined results because they do not include the payroll component.

The following results are for the PeopleSoft Payroll benchmark that was previous run. The results are not directly comparable with the combined results because they do not include the self-service component.

Configuration Summary

Application Configuration:

Database Configuration:

Web Tier Configuration:

Storage Configuration:

Benchmark Description

This benchmark combines PeopleSoft HCM 9.1 HR Self Service online and PeopleSoft Payroll batch workloads to run on a unified database deployed on Oracle Database 11g Release 2.

The PeopleSoft HRSS benchmark kit is a Oracle standard benchmark kit run by all platform vendors to measure the performance. It's an OLTP benchmark where DB SQLs are moderately complex. The results are certified by Oracle and a white paper is published.

PeopleSoft HR SS defines a business transaction as a series of HTML pages that guide a user through a particular scenario. Users are defined as corporate Employees, Managers and HR administrators. The benchmark consist of 14 scenarios which emulate users performing typical HCM transactions such as viewing paycheck, promoting and hiring employees, updating employee profile and other typical HCM application transactions.

All these transactions are well-defined in the PeopleSoft HR Self-Service 9.1 benchmark kit. This benchmark metric is the weighted average response search/save time for all the transactions.

The PeopleSoft 9.1 Payroll (North America) benchmark demonstrates system performance for a range of processing volumes in a specific configuration. This workload represents large batch runs typical of a ERP environment during a mass update. The benchmark measures five application business process run times for a database representing large organization. They are Paysheet Creation, Payroll Calculation, Payroll Confirmation, Print Advice forms, and Create Direct Deposit File. The benchmark metric is the cumulative elapsed time taken to complete the Paysheet Creation, Payroll Calculation and Payroll Confirmation business application processes.

The benchmark metrics are taken for each respective benchmark while running simultaneously on the same database back-end. Specifically, the payroll batch processes are started when the online workload reaches steady state (the maximum number of online users) and overlap with online transactions for the duration of the steady state.

Key Points and Best Practices

• Two PeopleSoft Domain sets with 200 application servers each on a SPARC T4-4 server were hosted in 2 separate Oracle Solaris Zones to demonstrate consolidation of multiple application servers, ease of administration and performance tuning.

• Each Oracle Solaris Zone was bound to a separate processor set, each containing 15 cores (total 120 threads). The default set (1 core from first and third processor socket, total 16 threads) was used for network and disk interrupt handling. This was done to improve performance by reducing memory access latency by using the physical memory closest to the processors and offload I/O interrupt handling to default set threads, freeing up cpu resources for Application Servers threads and balancing application workload across 240 threads.

• A total of 128 PeopleSoft streams server processes where used on the database node to complete payroll batch job of 500,000 employees in 32.4 minutes.

See Also

• Oracle PeopleSoft Benchmark White Papers
  oracle.com


• SPARC T4-2 Server
  oracle.com OTN
• SPARC T4-4 Server
  oracle.com OTN
• PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management
  oracle.com OTN
• PeopleSoft Enterprise Human Capital Management (Payroll)
  oracle.com OTN
• Oracle Solaris
  oracle.com OTN
• Oracle Database 11g Release 2
  oracle.com OTN

Disclosure Statement

Copyright 2012, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Results as of 8 November 2012.