1. Sybase microbenchmark on Linux and NT shows Linux 2x faster
All:
I hope that this isn't taken as a troll, or flame bait. We all know
that microbenchmarks have very little validity. I recently ran some
microbenchmarks, and got a very interesting result, that I'd thought
I would share.
The Benchmark:
Retrieve 1000 fairly wide rows from the Sybase, and store them in
memory on a PC client. The database data cache is "warmed up", so
there is no server I/O, and the client-side run times are relatively
repeatable (within 3 percent). I can't release the benchmark into the
public domain, but it would be trivial to duplicate it.
The program is written with ctlib, and runs basically unmodified on
Windows NT and Linux. The only modification is the syntax for the
embedded assembler on both, which is used to get the value of the
Pentium time stamp counter.
I have a dual-boot machine, which runs NT and Linux. This is a
Pentium 166, with 32 Mb RAM, and an Intel EtherExpress card. Neither
Linux (kernel version 2.0.0/gcc 2.7.2), nor NT (version 4.0 no service
packs, VC++ 4.0) are the latest and greatest, but I believe that they
are contemporaries. I compiled the program with the most optimization I
could easily find, but no heroic effort was made to fiddle with
compiler switches. That is, I just used gcc -O2, and "fastest code"
in VC++. In truth, the difference between no optimization and full
optimization made very little difference. I believe that most of the
time is spent in the ctlib code itself, which I wasn't compiling.
Number of Machine Cycles Linux NT
(to 2 digits)
(in millions) 70 130
(lower is better)
(real time)
Wow!
I was stunned at this result -- I didn't expect there to be much
difference. I have no idea why the Linux OS is so much faster - any
guesses? The code does pull a fair amount of data through the TCP
stack - I know that Linux's interrupt handling and syscalls are said
to be very fast. I would be surprised if gcc was _that_ much faster
than MSVC++.
Comments?
--
Greg Thain (520) 733-6396 voice
Sunquest Information System (520) 733-6602 FAX
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