LAMP refers to a solution stack of mainly open source software used to run websites, web servers or specific web applications like e.g. a web store. This combination of Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP/Phyton/Pearl has become popular because of its low acquisition cost and because of the ubiquity of its components which come bundled with most current Linux distributions.

Dolphin is targeting the growing web and data base application market place as more applications are developed to take advantage of clustered multi server architectures. Web service providers are investing in larger server farms using cluster and Grid architectures and are constantly looking to increase performance. The inherent challenges to cluster performance and cluster scalability are latency and bandwidth, with high interconnect latency being the single largest performance enhancer in database applications.

The MySQL experts in iClaustron AB have executed a benchmark to verify the performance improvement that Dolphin Express provides over competing interconnect technologies. The test run used a standard TPC-W benchmark, which simulates a real time web store with real life properties. Using standard Linux distributions (Fedora 8 and RedHat 4.4), Apache Tomcat and MySQL Cluster, the benchmark represented a standard software stack used by thousands of highly profiled web stores and other web applications.

For many years, Dolphin and MySQL have collaborated in optimizing the Dolphin Express solution for MySQL Cluster. The new optimizations built into Dolphin Express improves the interconnect performance between the web server, the application server and the database. Adding the inherent performance improvements of MySQL in clustered and replication architectures, the results proved to be significant, both for response time and throughput.

The benchmark showed that the LAMP stack using Dolphin Express builds a real-time web store application with very high performance, low response time and very high availability. The results demonstrate that Dolphin Express provides response improvements of up to 712% and throughput increased with up to 425% over Gigabit Ethernet. The performance increases are significant both in high and low load cases, especially in larger clusters.