[Phoronix] Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Fedora 11 Performance

[Chris Ball]

Hi,

   > "Our" Apache results on the Phoronix tests, AIUI, are from an
   > Apache they compiled, which is not what most people are going to
   > use.

Do similar results occur when you compare the installed Apaches instead,
or does the discrepancy go away?

   > There's also no mention of whether they mitigated the way results
   > would have changed from our use of SELinux.

Why would you want to mitigate that, in a comparison of distributions
out-of-the-box?  (And, what would "mitigate" mean here?)

   > Just another couple of gripes here, but I do agree with a
   > previous poster that a well-thought out series of benchmarks and
   > an explanation of their meaning would be far preferable to what
   > Phoronix publishes.

I guess I feel pretty consequentialist about this -- if the discrepancy
they measured doesn't actually exist in a form that our users might
hit, then they were wrong to post a badly-designed benchmark.

If it does exist, on the other hand, they've done us a large favour
by pointing out something we didn't know about (which might even be a
large regression from F10), and I'd feel that we should (a) thank them
and encourage them to run benchmarks more often, (b) fix our bug, and
(c) tell them how to improve their benchmarks, with patches, so that
it doesn't take so long to work out whether there's a real problem
next time.

The question is, which is it?

- Chris.
-- 
Chris Ball   <cjb at laptop.org>