A/UX performance

[Charles L Ditzel]

In article <4309 at hoptoad.uucp>, gnu at hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
> davidsen at steinmetz.steinmetz.ge.com (William E. Davidsen Jr) wrote:
> >                                                       At this time I
> > can't supply the original benchmarks.

I am always(!) suspicious of people that don't supply the benchmark code.
  
> Some of the numbers look pretty questionable to me, e.g. Sun-3/280 can
> do 7,650,000 trig functions per second, but only 74,300 float
> compare-and-branches?  Also note that the Sun being compared is the
> highest end 68020 based Sun (25MHz, big cache, pricey).

Actually some benchmarks have already emanated from the Mac group and they
compared the lowest end Sun 3/50...they showed an A/UX Mac II do be slow.

These were posted by : fnf at fishpond.UUCP (Fred Fish)

*Ok, with all the speculation about disk I/O, and the advantages/disadvantages
*of DMA, I decided to drag out and dust of a disk performance benchmark written
*by Rick Spanbauer a LONG time ago and used to test Amiga hard disks when they
*first became available.  Since I already had Sun 3/50 timings, all I had to
*do were the A/UX ones.  Here are my measured results using the diskperf.c
*program, and ballpark verified using the Unix dd program:

*Performance timings using Rick Spanbauer's diskperf.c program.

*					Amiga	Amiga	Mac-II	Sun
*					Floppy	CLtd	A/UX	3/50
*					df1:	dh0:	HD80SC	
*
*File creations (files/sec)		<=1	7	6	6
*File deletions (files/sec)		1	15	8	11
*Directory scan (entries/sec)		38	50	371	350
*Seek+read (seek+read/sec)		2	40	110	298
*Read speed,    512 buffer (byte/sec)	11014	17133	55168	240499
*Read speed,   4096 buffer (byte/sec)	12024	17133	53708	234057
*Read speed,   8192 buffer (byte/sec)	12080	17133	54013	233189
*Read speed,  32768 buffer (byte/sec)	12136	17133	53644	236343
*Write speed,   512 buffer (byte/sec)	4974	12603	44181	215166
*Write speed,  4096 buffer (byte/sec)	5180	13512	47211	182466
*Write speed,  8192 buffer (byte/sec)	5170	13653	46832	179755
*Write speed, 32768 buffer (byte/sec)	5190	13797	46930	187580
*
*Notes:
*	(1)	All Amiga tests done under 1.2 release 33.46.
*	(2)	df1: tests done after "addbuffers 32" & fresh formatted disk
*	(3)	All Amiga and Mac-II timings done by Fred Fish.
*	(4)	Sun-3/50 timings by Rick Spanbauer.

As can be seen the low-end 3/50 outperforms with relative ease the
Mac II. Of course, this is not the whole story.  These are the I/O
benchmarks. Other benchmarks would shed a little more light on the subject. 
(drystone, whetstone, etc.). Given Apple's rather cavalier attitude toward
Unix and it's distribution... If you don't care about Mac software both
the Sun 3/50 and 3/60 make better Unix platforms and cost less or about
the same...in addition the X11/NeWS environment will soon be a standard
part of Suns.

-----------------------
Naturally My Opinions Are My Own.