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From: jack@mcvax.cwi.nl (Jack Jansen)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.org.usenix
Subject: Re: Benchmarking the 532, 68030, MIPS, 386...at a Usenix!
Message-ID: <7387@boring.mcvax.cwi.nl>
Date: Sun, 17-May-87 09:53:00 EDT
Article-I.D.: boring.7387
Posted: Sun May 17 09:53:00 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 17-May-87 20:01:51 EDT
References: <324@dumbo.UUCP> <809@killer.UUCP> <2417@homxa.UUCP> <4294@nsc.nsc.com> <2128@hoptoad.uucp> <826@rtech.UUCP> <396@gumby.UUCP>
Reply-To: jack@boring.UUCP (Jack Jansen)
Organization: AMOEBA project, CWI, Amsterdam
Lines: 26
Xref: mnetor comp.arch:1332 comp.org.usenix:183

In article <396@gumby.UUCP> larry@gumby.UUCP (Larry Weber) writes:
>...  A page thrasher would be
>wonderful BUT it is highly dependent on I/O system, configurations, page
>size, MMU ... in fact so many things that I suspect it wouldn't be
>useful.
For me, it would be useful. If I'm looking for a machine to put 
30 first-year students on, I'm not interested in CPU performance at
all. I just want the system to run fast with 30 vi/cc/a.out users.

As an example: the 3B15 comes out of most benchmarks as a truly
lousy machine. However, something these benchmarks never show is
that the I/O system is very fast. The same more-or-less holds for
VAXen.

My favorite benchmark:
time ex /usr/dict/words <<FOO
10000,10060d
w /tmp/words
FOO
time diff /usr/dict/words /tmp/words >/dev/null

This gives you a reasonable idea of how fast vi starts (*very*
important), and how fast the I/O system (plus disks, etc) is.
-- 
	Jack Jansen, jack@cwi.nl (or jack@mcvax.uucp)
	The shell is my oyster.