Linux Benchmark Software?

[Tim Seufert]

On Monday, December 30, 2002, at 03:44  PM, William J. Brinkman wrote:

> You can see my results here:
> http://www.derandomized.org/index.php3?section=Home&subsection=System
>
> spaceclam and localhost are both my G3 450 iBook1 SE. What I found
> interesting was how bad the file and VM latencies are under OS X
> 10.1.x. When I first got these results, I assumed that lmbench had some
> kind of measurement problem under OS X, and that the numbers were 
> wrong.
>
> But in light of my experience... It seems to me that OS X is very 
> snappy
> and responsive now that I have 310 megs of RAM, but the increase in RAM
> didn't seem to affect my Linux observed performance very much. I 
> wonder if
> the file system really is enough slower in OS X that VM is mostly
> useless.

There are dramatic improvements in FS performance under 10.2.x, though 
it's still slower than Linux.  Here are the LMBench FS/VM latencies for 
the same system (dual GHz QuickSilver) under 10.2.3 and Linux 
2.4.19-something (it's a BenH kernel):

File & VM system latencies in microseconds - smaller is better
--------------------------------------------------------------
Host                 OS   0K File      10K File      Mmap    Prot    
Page
                         Create Delete Create Delete  Latency Fault   
Fault
--------- ------------- ------ ------ ------ ------  ------- -----   
-----
crow.loca    Darwin 6.3   80.3   92.2  461.3  104.0   6061.0  53.9  
3598.0
localhost Linux 2.4.19-   20.4 6.9520   72.2   20.4    904.0 0.743    
20.0

The last three tests are VM tests, and I think it is pretty much a 
given that Mach VM will never perform as well as Linux VM -- my 
impression is that Mach VM trades having more power and flexibility 
(highly modular design allowing for tricks such as userspace pagers, 
etc.) for less speed.

BTW, you might not have noticed much change in Linux performance 
because you weren't swapping in Linux to begin with.  OS X is a memory 
hog, in part because all windows are buffered, which avoids redraw on 
exposure of window contents and also helps the window server do all the 
fancy compositing (transparency) effects.