Virtualization — VMWare Workstation

A virtual machine is a simulated computer inside your computer that's completely independent of the host PC. This not only improves security, but also enables software written for different operating systems to execute on one physical machine. Virtualization is the foundation for "the cloud" and helps reduce hardware ownership cost by dynamically spreading out virtual machines over multiple computers to make the best use of available hardware resources. We're testing VM performance using VMWare Workstation with hardware virtualization support enabled for both Intel and AMD processors. Curiously, many motherboards ship with the virtualization setting disabled by default, so we made absolutely certain we had enabled it.

Database — MySQL

More data is stored and processed today than ever before in human history. Database systems that manage storage and retrieval throughout large data sets are the backbone for this revolution. Whenever you interact with a website or other digital service, one database is almost always guaranteed to be involved in returning the results you are looking for. We benchmark the most popular database system, MySQL, in the TPC-C test, which simulates a large number of warehouses and their constantly changing inventory. The reported number is "transactions per second," so higher is better.

Java

The Java programming language is designed to be platform independent, highly scalable, and fault tolerant, which is why it's very popular for enterprise services that work with large amounts of data and many concurrent users. Our test suite consists of a large mix of individual Java benchmarks, some of them single-threaded, some that scale somewhat, and some that fully scale to as many cores as are available.