RE: kernel performance update - 2.6.14-rc3

["Chen, Kenneth W" <kenneth.w.chen@intel.com>]

Nick Piggin wrote on Thursday, October 06, 2005 3:04 AM
> Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> >>dbench is catching some attention.  We just ran it with default
> >>parameter.  I don't think default parameter is the right one to use
> >>on some of our configurations.  For example, it shows +100% improvement
> > 
> > never ever consider dbench a serious benchmark; the thing is you can
> > make dbench a lot better very easy; just make the kernel run one thread
> > at a time until completion. dbench really gives very variable results,
> > but it is not really possible to say if +100% or -100% is an improvement
> > or a degredation for real life. So please just don't run it, or at least
> > don't interpret the results in a "higher is better" way.
> > 
> 
> As a disk IO performance benchmark you are absolutely right.
> 
> Some people like using it to test VM scalability and throughput
> if it is being used on tmpfs. In that case the results are
> generally more stable.

Thank you for the suggestion, we will look into the options.  I agree here
as well, and I also don't consider dbench as a serious disk I/O performance
benchmark.  There are other workloads that we ran (IOzone, aiostress, and my
favorite "industry standard database workload") which covers disk I/O side
pretty well.

- Ken