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Date:      Mon, 4 Jun 2007 14:16:04 -0400
From:      Kris Kennaway <kris@obsecurity.org>
To:        Tim Daneliuk <tundra@tundraware.com>
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: New != Faster
Message-ID:  <20070604181604.GB28548@rot13.obsecurity.org>
In-Reply-To: <466451CA.6020108@tundraware.com>
References:  <466451CA.6020108@tundraware.com>

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On Mon, Jun 04, 2007 at 12:54:18PM -0500, Tim Daneliuk wrote:
> In the course of trying to work through some problems with a new MOBO,
> I did some speed test which I found sort of surprising:
> 
> Old System
> ----------
> 
> Dual PIII 600Mhz w/768K Mem and Mylex RAID 5 with old 9G SCSI drived
> FBSD 4.11-Stable
> Writing a 1G file to /dev/null with dd reports about 26MB/sec
> 
> New System
> ----------
> 
> Pentium D 3.2GHz w/2G Mem and SATA Drive reported running at SATA-150
> FBSD 6.2-STABLE
> Writing a 2G file to /dev/null with dd reports about 50MB/sec
> 
> 
> So ... the new system should be much faster all the way around, right?
> Hmmmm, not necessarily so.  'buildworld' is only about 17% faster on the
> new machine v. the old.  I would think that with way faster processors
> and twice the disk bandwidth I would have seen far reduced buildworld
> times.  So, I decided to check a known fast machine.  The results:
> 
>      Procs                     Mem     dd Read        OS            
>      buildworld
> 
> 
> Old   2 PIII @600Mhz           768K    26M/sec    4.11-stable/SMP    50-60 
> min
> New   Pent D (2 core)@3.2GHz   2G     50M/sec    6.2-stable/SMP     40-50 
> min
> Fast  2 Xeon @3GHz             3G    130M/sec    4.11-stable/SMP        8 
> min
> 
> 
> So, now I'm confused.  These are all lightly loaded systems but the
> buildworld time does not scale even approximately by either CPU or
> I/O performance.  What the heck is going on, I wonder?  It is possible,
> I suppose that the "New" machine does not have SMP running properly on it,
> though 'top' shows two CPUs working away.  Is the difference in speed
> attributable to 4.11 being faster than 6.2?  Unfortunately, I cannot
> get 4.11 to boot on the "New" machine - it does not like the hardware
> for some reason claiming:
> 
>     RTC BIOS diagnostic error 80<clock battery>
> 
> Even after I change the RTC battery on the mobo.
> 
> Strange ... any input appreciated.

This comparison is 100% bogus.

4.11 and 6.2 are vastly different (the latter builds all sorts of
different code, and uses a *different compiler* that is slower in
compiling the code).  When trying to compare something, you have to
compare the *same* thing, or it's meaningless.

Kris




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