Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: IOStone
Message-ID: <2783@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 23 Oct 90 11:56:50 GMT
References: <7834@ucdavis.ucdavis.edu> <144018@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 24

In article <144018@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> lm@sun.UUCP (Larry McVoy) writes:

| Perhaps you would care to comment on why this benchmark was rejected as
| an addition to the standard SPEC benchmarks?   Especially in light of the
| fact that SPEC would *love* to add an IO benchmark to their suite that
| does what you claim yours does.

  There are many possible reasons, most of which are related to the fit
between IOstone and what SPEC wants to include as an IO benchmark. My
impression is that they want something to measure the performance of the
disk drives rather than the effective performance as seen by a typical
program. This is undoubtedly only part of the reason.

| Come on guys, it's obvious that you blew it with this benchmark.  Instead of
| arguing endlessly about how great it is, why don't you go off and try again?

  The nice thing about this is that you have such a detached attitude
and have presented a great list of technical flaws ;-) IOstone returns
results which match *in ratio* measurements of production IO bound
programs. Therefore many of us find the results useful for comparing
machine to one another as platforms for running that load.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
    VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix.