Re: Don't use dbench for benchmarks

From: Richard B. Johnson (root@chaos.analogic.com)
Date: Mon Jan 28 2002 - 12:55:00 EST


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 nigel@nrg.org
> 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.

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