Re: Don't use dbench for benchmarks

[Richard B. Johnson]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Nigel Gamble wrote:

> On Mon, 28 Jan 2002, Richard B. Johnson wrote:
> > It seems that compiling the Linux Kernel while burning a CDROM gives
> > a good check of "acceptable" performance. But, such operations are
> > not "benchmarks". The trick is to create a benchmark that performs
> > many "simultaneous" independent and co-dependent operations using
> > I/O devices that everyone is likely to have. I haven't seen anything
> > like this yet.
> >
> > Such a benchmark might have multiple tasks performing things like:
> >
> > (1)	Real Math on large arrays.
> >
> > (2)	Data-base indexed lookups.
> >
> > (3)	Data-base keys sorting.
> >
> > (4)	Small file I/O with multiple creations and deletions.
> >
> > (5)	Large file I/O operations with many seeks.
> >
> > (6)	Multiple "network" Client/Server tasks through loop-back.
> >
> > (7)	Simulated compiles by searching directory trees for
> > 	"include" files, reading them and closing them, while
> > 	performing string-searches to simulate compiler parsing.
> >
> > (8)	Two or more tasks communicating using shared-RAM. This
> > 	can be a "nasty" performance hog, but tests the performance
> > 	of threaded applications without having to write those
> > 	applications.
> >
> > (9)	And more....
> >
> >
> > These tasks would be given a "performance weighting value", a heuristic
> > that relates to perceived overall performance.
> 
> It sounds like you are describing the Aim Benchmark suite, which has
> been used for years to compare unix system performancem, and was
> recently released under the GPL by Caldera.
> 
> See http://caldera.com/developers/community/contrib/aim.html
> 
> Nigel Gamble                                    [e-mail]
> Mountain View, CA, USA.                         http://www.nrg.org/
> 

That sounds good. Have you tried it? Does it seem to provide the
kind of data that will show the effect of various trade-offs?

Cheers,
Dick Johnson

Penguin : Linux version 2.4.1 on an i686 machine (797.90 BogoMips).

    I was going to compile a list of innovations that could be
    attributed to Microsoft. Once I realized that Ctrl-Alt-Del
    was handled in the BIOS, I found that there aren't any.