Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!mnetor!seismo!rutgers!ames!oliveb!pyramid!prls!mips!mash From: mash@mips.UUCP (John Mashey) Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.org.usenix Subject: Re: Benchmarking the 532, 68030, MIPS, 386...at a Usenix! Message-ID: <415@winchester.UUCP> Date: Thu, 21-May-87 23:44:20 EDT Article-I.D.: winchest.415 Posted: Thu May 21 23:44:20 1987 Date-Received: Sat, 23-May-87 14:42:43 EDT References: <324@dumbo.UUCP> <809@killer.UUCP> <2417@homxa.UUCP> Reply-To: mash@winchester.UUCP (John Mashey) Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA Lines: 28 Xref: mnetor comp.arch:1384 comp.org.usenix:207 In article <7387@boring.mcvax.cwi.nl> jack@boring.UUCP (Jack Jansen) writes: >In article <396@gumby.UUCP> larry@gumby.UUCP (Larry Weber) writes: >>... A page thrasher would be >>wonderful BUT it is highly dependent on .... >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.... >My favorite benchmark: >time ex /usr/dict/words <10000,10060d >w /tmp/words >FOO >time diff /usr/dict/words /tmp/words >/dev/null As larry says, real page-thrashers are highly dependent on a lot of attributes. That doesn't mean they're bad tests, merely that they're extremely hard to do in a controlled way. In particular, you often see radically different results according to buffer cache sizes, for example. Also, on this test, CPU (user + sys) is about 70-85% of real time, i.e., I think you would care about CPU performance, since it's as important as the disks in the timing. What sort of numbers were you getting on the 3B15s? -- -john mashey DISCLAIMER: UUCP: {decvax,ucbvax,ihnp4}!decwrl!mips!mash, DDD: 408-720-1700, x253 USPS: MIPS Computer Systems, 930 E. Arques, Sunnyvale, CA 94086