Benchmarking OS's

[John Summerfied]

Justin Conover wrote:
> What are some good test to run to benchmark OS's on the same hardware?
> 
> Not trying to flame Solaris or anything, but I'm curious because I run
> several *nix's on my box, and Rawhide always seems to visually/perception of
> running the fastest, and Solaris(nevada/opensolaris) seems to perform the
> worst.
> 
> So I would like to run some test to find out if my perceptions are all
> biased :)
> 
> 
Given enough RAM, disk is next most important. For that there are 
bonnie++ and another, I think TIO.

Bad numbers from bonnie++ will mean applications are slower to load (but 
there are tricks, so test how fast to load OpenOffice.org, Mozilla and 
some other large apps separately).

If you copy large files around (disk to disk, across the LAN), measure 
how fast _you_ can do it _your_ way.

btw
If Linux is on /dev/hda1 and Solaris on /dev/hda2 then measuring disk 
performance within hda1 for Linux and hda2 for Solaris is "no fair."

Disk performance varies across the surface:
[summer at bilby ~]$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/hda{,5}

/dev/hda:
  Timing buffered disk reads:  162 MB in  3.00 seconds =  53.92 MB/sec

/dev/hda5:
  Timing buffered disk reads:  154 MB in  3.02 seconds =  50.92 MB/sec
[summer at bilby ~]$

I have a script I wrote some years ago (when 8 Gb was big). I just 
adapted it to my 120 Gb drive. Here are some of the last lines of the 
report:
+ dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=1024 skip=61440
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out

real    0m20.931s
user    0m0.015s
sys     0m4.391s
+ N=7
+ test 7 -lt 10
+ dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=1024 skip=71680
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out

real    0m21.930s
user    0m0.007s
sys     0m4.375s
+ N=8
+ test 8 -lt 10
+ dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=1024 skip=81920
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out

real    0m24.473s
user    0m0.006s
sys     0m4.473s
+ N=9
+ test 9 -lt 10
+ dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=1048576 count=1024 skip=92160
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out

real    0m27.329s
user    0m0.011s
sys     0m4.406s
+ N=10
+ test 10 -lt 10


For any who'd like to run it themselves:
#!/bin/bash
N=0
MB=$((1024*1024))
set -x
while test  $N -lt 10
         do
                 time dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/null bs=$MB count=1024 
skip=$((N*10240)) \
                         || exit $?
                 N=$((N+1))
         done
[summer at bilby ~]$



-- 

Cheers
John

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