Linux Benchmarking

[Walter Dnes]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2005 at 12:29:01AM -0400, Jason Carson wrote
> Greetings,
> 
> I am thinking about doing a Linux comparison by benchmarking various
> distros then posting the results on my website.
> 
> Does anyone have any recommendations as to what software I can use to do
> the benchmarking. I found this page with a bunch of tests
> (http://lbs.sourceforge.net/)

  I'm old enough to remember the NEC V20 chip getting 20% better results
on Norton SI (System Info) than the stock Intel 8088.  Real-world tests
showed *AT MOST* 5-to-8 percent improvement.  Eventually, NEC got out of
the 8088-clone-chip business.  And of course, RISC-chip manufacturers
just *LOVE* comparing their chips doing no-op loops versus X86 CPUs
doing no-op loops.  That's because no-op is almost the only instruction
where it doesn't take umpteen RISC instructions to emulate one CISC
instruction.

  A meaningful test would be the same application doing the same
real-world tasks on the same machine running the same WM.  You'd
probably need some serious scripting to ensure repeatability.  Also,
remember to create separate tests for first access after bootup and
repeated accesses thereafter.

  For many tasks, e.g. reading/writing email, it would take monstrous
misconfiguration to slow down things to the point where any difference
is noticable.  Speed only matters in heavy-duty stuff.  E.g. I've had
mplayer warn me that my 6-year-old Dell (450 mhz PIII with 128 megs of
RAM) is too slow to handle internet TV.  Yes, it does drop frames.  I am
not heavily into gaming, but that's another area where you'll probably
see a difference.  After switching from Debian to Gentoo, I had to patch
the delay loop in Xboing to slow it down so that I could play it.  No,
I'm not kidding.

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes-SLHPyeZ9y/tg9hUCZPvPmw at public.gmane.org>
My musings on technology and security at http://tech_sec.blog.ca
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