Re: 2.2.18Pre Lan Performance Rocks!

Matti Aarnio
2000-10-31T23:22:05Z

On Tue, Oct 31, 2000 at 01:36:32PM -0800, Paul Menage wrote:
> On Tue, 31 Oct 2000, Rik van Riel wrote:
> >Ummm, last I looked Linux held the Specweb99 record;
> >by a wide margin...
>
> ... but since then IBM/Zeus appear to have taken the lead:
>
> http://www.spec.org/osg/web99/results/res2000q3/
>
> But they were using a somewhat beefier machine - has anyone got Tux
> SpecWeb99 figures for a 12 CPU, 64 GB, 12 NIC system?

Good grief, what monster hardware...

Those are (of course) system results which give some impression of
how much users can pull out of the box.

Trying to make them a bit more comparable, scaling the number with
the number of processors:

Zeus 12x600MHz IBM RS64-III 7288 SpecWEB99 ~ 607 SpecWEB99/CPU
Zeus 4x375MHz IBM Power3-II 2175 SpecWEB99 ~ 544 SpecWEB99/CPU
TUX 1.0 8x700MHz Pentium-III-Xeon 6387 SpecWEB99 ~ 798 SpecWeb99/CPU
IIS 2x800MHz Pentium-III-Xeon 1060 SpecWEB99 ~ 530 SpecWEB99/CPU
IIS 1x700MHz Pentium-III-Xeon 971 SpecWEB99 = 971 SpecWEB99/CPU

Ok, more workers to do the thing, but each can achieve a bit less in
the IBM/Zeus case than TUX 1.0. The smaller IBM/Zeus test case with
older and slower processors yields almost as good results per CPU as
the big one. CPU clock speed increase has been lost into inter-CPU
collisions ? (that is, bad scaling)

The IIS results are also interesting in their own. Single-CPU IIS
yields impressive PER CPU result, but adding second CPU is apparently
quite useless excercise. Hmm... Can't be.. As if that DUAL CPU
result is actually run in single-CPU mode. The difference can
directly be explained by the clock rate difference..
(Surely the runners of that test *can't* make such an elementary
mistake!)

To be able to compare apples and apples, I would like to see single,
and dual CPU SpecWEB99 results with TUX. Then that apparent 20%
better "per CPU result" of the single-CPU IIS could not be explained
away with SMP inter-CPU communication overhead/collisions.

> Paul

/Matti Aarnio