unix-pc benchmarks

[C M Votava]

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