The lost art of benchmarking was Re: Reiser4
Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha
strange at nsk.no-ip.org
Mon Sep 20 17:06:56 UTC 2004
On Mon, Sep 20, 2004 at 06:16:35PM +0200, Leonard den Ottolander wrote:
> Hello Jonathan,
>
> On Mon, 2004-09-20 at 16:31, Jonathan Corbet wrote:
> > > He also compiled the kernel as a benchmark. 99% of times this is the
> > > touchstone for lack of proper thinking in benchmarking.
> >
> > Because I benchmarked an actual task that my readers are likely to
> > perform?
>
> No, because if you benchmark a file system you shouldn't benchmark a CPU
> intensive task like compiling a kernel as file system performance will
> only have a relatively small impact on the compilation time
> (signal/noise). That sounds like valid criticism to me.
He wasn't benchmarking the machines, he was benchmarking the file
systems.
All else being equal, a usual operation as a fs benchmark is a valid
one.
A simple, idiotic test like flipping 0s and 1s in ram would still be a
valid test, though with much less significance. If a simple memtest
resulted if so very different results if under different filesystems,
then something would be very wrong with one of them.
Regards,
Luciano Rocha
PS: A compilation can be very dependent on file system performance. Not
usually as much as the processor, of course, but stil...
--
Consciousness: that annoying time between naps.
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