The Underscore Archives

			Jan Grant wrote:

> On Wed, 1 Nov 2006, Iain Hallam wrote:
> 
>> I have just been running extensive tests on identical X4100s with 12 GB
>> RAM and dual CPUs for number crunching. We essentially pitted Red Hat
>> Enterprise AS against Solaris 10 and discovered that the Red Hat box had
>> a performance advantage of 3:2
> 
> That sounds so spectacular that it makes me think something's broken. 
> The OS shouldn't get in the way of straight-line computation that much - 
> what were the benchmarks, out of interest?

It was a series of tests based on the every-day usage of our stats
package from researchers. The computation part was probably pretty even,
but there's a fair amount of writing intermediate results files out for
further analysis, and I suspect from the numbers that it's the disk
systems that are causing the difference.

One other factor in this particular scenario is that our researchers are
heavily biased to a single package which is developed on Linux and
optimised for it. (Hence the warning about application variance.) That
is what is likely causing the slower usage of the hard disk in the above
results.

- Iain.