Re: [BENCHMARK] ext3, reiser, jfs, xfs effect on contest

[Andrew Morton <akpm@digeo.com>]

Hans Reiser <reiser@namesys.com> wrote:
>
> compilation is not an effective benchmark anymore, not for Linux 
> filesystems, they are all just too fast (or is it that the compilers are 
> too slow?....)
> 

The point of this test is to measure interactions, and fairness.

It answers the question "how much impact does heavy filesystem I/O have upon
other system activity?".

The "other system activity" in this test is a kernel compile.  That is a
fairly reasonable metric, because it is sensitive to latencies in servicing
reads and it is sensitive to inappropriate page replacement decisions.

A more appropriate foreground load might be opening a word processor and
composing a short letter to Aunt Nellie, but that's harder to automate.  We
expect that reduced kernel compilation time will correlate with lower-latency
letter writing.