#InterSystems Business Solutions and Architectures

During recent large scale benchmarking activities, we were seeing excessive %sys CPU time that negatively impacted scaling of the application.

Problem

We have found that a lot of the time was spent in the localtime() system call due to the TZ environment variable not being set.  A simple test routine was created to confirm the observation, and the elapse time differences and CPU resources needed with TZ set versus TZ not set were astonishing.  It was discovered that the inherit use of stat() system calls to /etc/local_time from localtime() are very expensive when TZ is not set.

Recommendation

Often times support and sales engineers are asked about recent benchmark results on various platforms and large scale configurations.  These will be made available here in the Developer Community in the "Documentation" section, and as an example here's a link to a recent Intel E7 v2 series processor benchmark.

https://community.intersystems.com/documentation/data-scalability-intersystems-caché-and-intel-processors-0

There are several reports available and more will be made available on an on-going basis.