7.0 CPU and Memory Performance

[Robert Watson]

On Tue, 12 Aug 2008, Tim Traver wrote:

> I have recently had the opportunity to upgrade a few servers from old 
> versions of 5.4 to 7.0, and have seen some interesting data. Before doing 
> this, I wanted to take some benchmarks to see how the scripts that I would 
> run would fare between the two versions, and the results are somewhat 
> confusing...

There are potentially a lot of variables here, you migh want to try fiddling 
with the following and see what difference it makes:

(1) Try both 4BSD and ULE in 7.0 -- they have different properties, and at the
     very least it would be nice to see what impact it has.

(2) Statically compile the 5.4 binary, and run the same binary on both 5.4 and
     7.0 -- there have been lots of compiler changes, which might be relevant.

Also, can you confirm that you're running either 32-bit or 64-bit kernels 
consistently on both versions of FreeBSD?

Robert N M Watson
Computer Laboratory
University of Cambridge

>
> I tried to get as many ducks in a row before posting this, cause i don't want 
> to waste any of the developers precious time, but I can't guarantee that my 
> methods were not flawed.
>
> For simplicity, I used a port called ubench (the latest version 0.3, which I 
> know is quite old) to get the following numbers :
>
> Since I was doing this on the same machine, with completely different builds 
> (not simply a compile upgrade, but a full install), I figure it doesn't 
> really matter what kind of machine it is, but just for grins, it is a Dual 
> Opteron with 2GB of memory in it, compiled with the i386 confs.
>
> The 7.0 is compiled with the ULE scheduler...
>
> The following are averages of at least 5 runs :
>
> FreeBSD 5.4 - CPU 112,721 - MEM - 146,483
> FreeBSD 7.0 - CPU 177,339 - MEM - 95,920
>
> Now, I really don't know exactly what the ubench program is doing, but I 
> think the description says that it is doing random integer and floating point 
> operations for the CPU tests, and random memory allocation and copying for 
> the memory test.
>
> So, can we explain the difference???? It looks like the latest SMP code 
> allows it to process more operations, but what happened to the memory 
> operations????
>
> Just to get an idea of what this was going to do to my scripts, I tried some 
> benchmarks for those as well.
>
> I tried to run a PHP script using php 4.4.7 and got the following results :
>
> Using "time php index.php" to get the real time :
>
> FreeBSD 5.4 - 0.290 seconds
> FreeBSD 7.0 - 0.335 seconds
>
> So, do the slower memory operations cause that difference in the real time it 
> takes to run that script???
>
> Thanks,
>
> Tim.
>
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