cmv@ttrde.UUCP (C M Votava) (02/17/89)
I was going through some of my old BYTE issues, and found an interesting article about benchmarking unix systems. The article starts on page 132 of the August 1984 issue. The C source is printed within the article for the benchmark routines, so I typed them into my unix-pc, and came up with some interesting numbers, which appear in the chart below. Since the type of unix-pc configuration that you have is *VERY* important to the results of many of these timings, I'll describe my setup in detail. Hopefully, some others will run the benchmarks on different setups and post their results, so that we can see how various components effect things. One note of warning, after running the pipe.c benchmark (on both unix-pc, and 3b2) the child did not exit after the parent did. I'm not sure why yet, but I'll investigate more to try and find out why. Make sure you remember to kill of the children after running a verbatim copy of this program. I have a unix-pc with 1Mbyte of memory on the motherboard, and 2Mbtyes on an expansion board (the expansion memory runs slower than the motherboard memory). I am running the 3.51c version of the operating system overlaying all the previous upgrades with the commercial 3.51 as a base. The hard disk controller is the stock WD1010, and the P5.1 motherboard upgrade is installed on this machine. The hard disk is a CDC SWIFT 3.5" 100MB half height drive with the following attributes: Data transfer rate 5.0Mbits/sec Rotational speed 3600r/min +- 5% Average Latency 8.33ms Step pulse rate (max) 6 usec between steps Step pulse rate (min) 200 usec between steps Single track seek time 4 ms max Average seek time 15ms(typical) 16.5ms(max of averages) Maximum seek time 35ms Apart from that, there is nothing else that should be different from any other unixpc. Let me know if I missed something. So, without furthur delay, here is a chart of the timings done by Byte, with the addition of the timings that I got from my unix-pc: ====================================================================== System Time in seconds Pipe System Call Function Call # Machine OS r u s r u s u ====================================================================== 0 unix-pc 3.51c 3.1 0.0 1.4 7.1 0.2 6.8 0.8 1 VAX-11/780 4.1BSD 3.2 0.1 1.2 4.8 1.4 4.0 1.0 2 Masscomp SysIII+ 5.7 0.0 2.8 6.3 0.4 5.8 0.9 3 Sun-2/120 4.2BSD 7.6 0.1 3.7 6.8 1.1 5.6 0.8 4 VAX-11/750 4.1BSD 4.6 0.2 2.1 7.0 0.9 6.2 1.7 5 PDP-11/70 2.8BSD 8.1 0.0 3.4 8.0 0.2 7.5 1.0 6 Altos 986 XENIX 6.0 0.1 2.8 11.0 0.8 10.3 0.4 7 IBM PC XT PC/IX 16.6 0.1 7.6 39.8 2.9 35.6 4.7 8 PDP 11/23 VENIX 30.0 01 9.5 24.0 3.2 20.4 3.3 9 IBM PC XT VENIX 18.0 0.1 7.3 20.5 2.3 17.8 2.8 10 SCI-1000 SysIII+ 9.3 0.0 3.1 26.2 0.7 24.2 1.2 11 Omnibyte Idris8 32.0 0.1 30.4 21.3 2.5 18.4 1.7 12 TRS-80 16B XENIX 8.0 0.1 3.4 15.0 1.5 12.7 1.4 13 PDP11/23 V7 23.0 0.1 10.7 36.5 0.9 33.7 3.6 14 DEC Pro/350 VENIX 26.0 0.5 13.8 33.3 5.8 26.5 3.5 15 Apple Lisa SysIII+ 8.1 0.0 3.0 10.5 0.2 9.1 1.3 ============================================================================ System Time in seconds Sieve Disk Disk Shell Loop Write Read # Machine r u s r r r u s r u s ============================================================================ 0 unix-pc 2.2 2.1 0.0 2.8 4.4 3.0 0.2 0.9 3.4 3.2 0.0 1 VAX-11/780 1.7 1.5 0.1 2.0 8.0 3.3 0.3 1.3 2.6 2.5 0.1 2 Masscomp 2.8 2.5 0.1 1.7 - 3.5 0.4 1.4 6.6 6.3 0.1 3 Sun-2/120 5.1 2.8 0.4 1.8 4.9 3.5 0.3 2.0 7.4 7.0 0.1 4 VAX-11/750 2.4 2.7 0.1 3.0 8.0 3.8 0.4 1.5 5.1 4.9 0.1 5 PDP-11/70 2.3 1.6 0.1 4.0 9.5 4.0 0.2 1.7 7.9 7.1 0.2 6 Altos 986 3.3 3.0 0.0 3.5 7.3 7.0 0.4 1.6 13.3 13.0 0.1 7 IBM PC XT 8.2 7.8 0.3 11.6 20.7 8.5 1.1 3.2 32.2 31.5 0.3 8 PDP 11/23 5.5 5.1 0.1 8.0 33.7 12.0 0.7 4.8 26.0 25.2 0.1 9 IBM PC XT 9.0 8.2 0.3 7.0 25.6 13.0 0.8 4.2 32.7 31.4 0.3 10 SCI-1000 4.4 3.6 0.1 4.3 9.1 13.6 0.5 1.9 14.5 13.6 0.2 11 Omnibyte 7.0 5.4 0.4 12.3 - 17.6 0.3 16.1 17.0 16.1 0.4 12 TRS-80 16B 6.0 4.8 0.3 8.0 22.0 18.0 0.4 2.6 14.0 12.5 0.5 13 PDP11/23 5.8 5.3 0.1 22.0 32.7 20.4 0.8 8.5 27.4 25.9 0.3 14 DEC Pro/350 6.3 5.1 0.1 7.7 28.0 27.0 0.8 4.7 26.7 25.3 0.1 15 Apple Lisa 6.1 5.3 0.1 20.6 44.5 37.6 0.4 3.2 14.0 12.0 0.2 In short, the unix-pc looks pretty good, compairing it to older machines. I wonder how some later machines would fit in there. I'll leave it up to the net for more detailed analysis. -Craig Votava [att!]looney!cmv