22.9 Million Transactions Per Minute and Microsecond Latencies on a Single Commodity Server with Forsa

Formulus Black has developed a Linux-based software platform called Forsa that enables any application to run in-memory without modifications. Forsa does this by allowing applications to use memory (DRAM, NVDIMM, Intel® Optane™ Memory Mode, etc.) as storage instead of slower spinning disks or flash media. Forsa provides a KVM based hypervisor and GUI + RESTful APIs for virtual compute and storage configuration and management and supports a “host mode” for Linux-based applications where virtualization is not required. 

Formulus Black engaged End Point to benchmark the performance of Microsoft SQL Server running on a mid-range Intel server with Ubuntu Linux and Forsa installed. Test results include achieving over 22.9 million aggregate transactions per minute in “host mode” and over 5.1 million aggregate transactions per minute in a virtualized environment. Latency was an impressive 0.25ms, on average. 

These results imply significant mixed read / write workload performance can be achieved even on a single mid-range Intel server by running applications in memory with Forsa.