From: drew@ophelia.cs.colorado.edu (Drew Eckhardt) Subject: Re: How fast? Date: Sat, 23 May 1992 07:42:03 GMT
In article <1992May22.192042.5479@news.uit.no> thostr@stud.cs.uit.no (Thomas Strandenaes) writes:
>Has anyone tried the performance of Linux?
Yes. Someone ran the Byte Unix benchmarks, and Linux
compared quite well against the baseline system,
a 386-33 running some flavor of SYSVr4.
Linux came in at 1.9, even though at that time disk performance
was abysmall (.2 times the baseline), in comparison, a 25Mhz 68040 based NeXT
measured 1.7. Linux has a very low overhead for syscalls, which really
helps it, and GCC does a good job of optimization.
>I've seen some disk-benchmarks, and they
>weren't exactly impressing, but I guess that's
Not as much the filesystem, but the disk driver.
However, Branko Lancaster (sorry about the spelling if I butchered it)
fixed this to a degree, and his patches made it into .96a.
I saw a performance incrase of over 6X on read, a little less on
write. Performance went from 50K/second, to over 300K/second
(MFM disk, normal fragmentation).
>That would definately kill the 'compile emacs'
>benchmark.
>
>I've got a 386/40 system with 8 Mb ram - can
>I expect some decent performance?
>
Definately.