New != Faster

[Tim Daneliuk]

Colin Percival wrote:
> Tim Daneliuk wrote:
>> Old   2 PIII @600Mhz           768K    26M/sec    4.11-stable/SMP   
>> 50-60 min
>> New   Pent D (2 core)@3.2GHz   2G     50M/sec    6.2-stable/SMP    
>> 40-50 min
>> Fast  2 Xeon @3GHz             3G    130M/sec    4.11-stable/SMP       
>> 8 min
>>
>> Is the difference in speed
>> attributable to 4.11 being faster than 6.2?
> 
> Close.  The difference in speed is due to the compiler in 4.11 being
> faster than the compiler in 6.2.  FreeBSD uses the gcc compiler, and
> between FreeBSD 4.11 and FreeBSD 6.2 that has been upgraded from 2.9
> to 3.4.  The general trend each time gcc is upgraded is that it takes
> 2x longer to compile code, but produces code which is 5% faster (as a
> result of "working harder" to find optimizations).
> 
> FreeBSD 6.2 is faster than FreeBSD 4.11 for almost everything except
> compiling itself. :-)
> 
> Colin Percival
> 

So ... if I ran compute bound tests like SPECmark or some kind
of I/O intensive tests, I should expect better runtime performance from
6.2 than 4.11...  I can live with that :)




-- 
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Tim Daneliuk     tundra at tundraware.com
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