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From: wunder@orac.HP.COM (Walter Underwood)
Newsgroups: comp.benchmarks
Subject: Re: More issues of benchmarking
Message-ID: <19040001@orac.HP.COM>
Date: 21 Nov 90 22:44:20 GMT
References: <7601@eos.arc.nasa.gov>
Organization: HP Software Engineering Systems, Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 30


   This is the shortest Unix benchmark I know:
           echo 99k2vp8opq | /bin/time dc > /dev/null

Interesting.  A friend of mine was using a very similar benchmark at
least seven years ago.  Originally, it was:

   echo 2^5000 | /bin/time bc > /dev/null

but that includes significant amounts of time in printing the large
number, so the benchmark was changed to:

   echo 2^5000/2^5000 | /bin/time bc

which prints "1".

Last time I looked at the guts of bc, this should be mostly following
pointer chains and doing arithmetic with small integers.  It uses base
100, kept in indvidual bytes, I think.

wunder

PS: On a somewhat busy 50 MHz 60030 machine (HP9000/375, HP-UX 7.0):

$ echo 2^5000/2^5000 | /bin/time bc
1

real       14.4
user        9.4
sys         0.1