Re: Re: Linux/Windows Universal Benchmark

[Andy Morris]

Just been browsing and came across this dicussion, and thought i might be 
able to give some input.

I'm a software grad (well this summer) and use both linux(gentoo 2.6.xxx 
cant remember specifically) and xp pro sp1 as home os's (games, dev etc) and 
when building a fairly small application i felt that it was taking too long 
to build my code using linux (approx 70 secs).  So I logged into my windows 
and it did it in under 40 secs, quite a difference.

However, these two machines were of different spec

xp:    2500xp(1.833mhz) barton 512cache,1gig ram, 7200 sata hdd (high spec)
linux:1900xp(1.6mhz)  thoroughbred 256cache, 1gig ram, 5400 ide hdd (fairly 
low spec)

I would accept a relatively small diff between the two machines (but a 
difference since one is more powerful) and since there were approx 150 
source files the hard drive reads could have caused a difference.

So what I had was a biased test result.

My first thoughts would be to write a tiny application that would not use 
the harddrive and compare again,  so i made a simple program to count from 0 
to a parameter x number of times, test data was to count 0-999999999 100 
times. XP box did it in 3mins 10 secs, linux 5 mins 4 secs ( i did this 
numerous times and results were always v similar). Again big difference, so 
it definetely wasn't the harddrive's access time etc.  So the only way I was 
going to find out was to install Linux on my xp box and dual boot it (which 
I did).

So XP and Gentoo Linux on the same box, and xp still beats it hands down (it 
only improved by around 30 secs), which really dissapointed me.  It makes me 
want to use my xp box for more stuff than previously, which i had been 
trying not since i like using kde over the Windows desktop

Now one thing I should have mentioned earlier is that the app was written in 
Java (compiled using Sun's jdk1.4.2 (not gentoo's blackdown since it's too 
buggy)) and we are therefore also testing the platform implementation of the 
VM (if you don't know about java basically when code runs there is a 
middleman between the code running and the OS (the Java Virtual Machine).  
It is possible that the jdk does not work as well on Linux but this is what 
I use and so do millions of others, and therefore it's can be a v good 
benchmark.  I will shortly if i get some time repeat the tests in C++ to 
remove this factor (it interfaces directly with the OS since it's compiled 
into native binaries) and if any1 does care for the result then let me know.

Now if you think my benchmark is totally unsafe/inaccurate as a means for 
benchmarking then feel free to state so, but compiling and running java code 
is something I do frequently, and Linux can't seem to do it as quickly as 
XP.

Just to sum up my findings, from my testing XP seems to run simple 
sequential cpu tasks not much less than twice the speed of Linux.

My afterthoughts about the two OS's is that if I ran multiple threads of my 
test (say 500) that my XP box would flake out and linux would handle it much 
better, perhaps when i go away for the wkend next i'll do that but right now 
iv got far too much work to do on them (final yr proj).

Hope this helped any1,

-andy

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