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Operating Systems Software GNU is Not Unix Linux

Open Source OS Benchmarking Competition 314

Posted by timothy from the make-it-squeal-like-a-pig dept.
BenchmarkingFreak writes "OSnews is running a story about a new benchmarking competition: OSU Open Source Lab wanted to take the concept of benchmarking a little bit further with the Beaver Challenge 2004. In this competition they will be allowing a community of experts in each OS to tweak their configurations to ensure maximum performance. And they are running it all on wicked machines, just imagine... well you know."
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Open Source OS Benchmarking Competition More

Open Source OS Benchmarking Competition

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  • Missing One? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by elid ( 672471 ) <eli DOT ipod AT gmail DOT com> on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:01PM (#8165969)
    We have selected the following distributions. This list is not final and if people want to ante in to try this with their favorite distro, let us know at bc2004 at osuosl dot org or in #beaverchallenge on the Freenode.net IRC network.

    * Debian GNU/Linux
    * Fedora Linux
    * FreeBSD
    * Gentoo Linux
    * NetBSD
    * OpenBSD
    * Red Hat Linux
    * Slackware Linux
    * SuSE GNU/Linux

    Where's Mandrake?

    • Mandrake is more of a "user friendly" distro then a performance optimized distribution. Someone might add Mandrake to the list, but it's not as tightly configured as say Gentoo and I can't imagine what purpose it would be to add it to the competition except for just representation.
      • I've never used Mandrake but didn't it start out as a version of RedHat compiled for the Pentium instead of the 486?

        • Re:It's not performance optimized. (Score:4, Interesting)

          by zenyu ( 248067 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2004 @12:53AM (#8166827)
          I've never used Mandrake but didn't it start out as a version of RedHat compiled for the Pentium instead of the 486?

          First it was based off debian. The real motivation was KDE. Of course the first Mandrake I used was based off Redhat and I used Gnome. It was compiled for i586, but more importantly for me as a developer, it had more up to date packages. This meant I only had to upgrade the components I was working on and not every library it depended on. I still use Mandrake at work, but at home where I do more tweaking I use Gentoo, which is too bleading edge for day-to-day, but great for developing for newish hardware. I tried Gentoo on my laptop, but while it was faster, it was too much work to keep up to date, so I went back to Mandrake. My main box at home just runs a script every night to keep up to date, it wouldn't be a big deal if it were rooted so I sleep well at night.
          • First it was based off debian

            Hmm, interesting, did not know about that. Mandrake does use Debian's menu system, but the first version [mandrakesoft.com] I heard about was 5.1, and it was already based on Red Hat, which I think was at version 5.0 at that time, thus the version number.
            • The first version I recall is 5.1 was which indeed based on Red Hat. From the Mandrake 5.1 release notes.

              "Linux-Mandrake is an updated Linux-RH 5.1 GPL, with KDE 1.0 fully integrated and preconfigured in it. Those two parts have been (not so much) modified and improved to work properly together."

              Red Hat didn't use to include KDE so we had to download it and configure it ourselves. Actually it was pretty easy. But for those who had heard of Linux and wanted the easiest to use DE (because of KDE) many trie
        • Correct, it started out as Red Hat with KDE compiled for a pentium (i586) class machines.

          Much of the philosophy of MDK is very similar to Debian. The base distro only has Free Software.

          Much of the functionality is similar too, the menu structure for the WM/DM is Debians, and the package manager is urpmi. URPMI is like apt where it has server lists and does automatic dependancy resolution, checks package signing, and allows autmation of the install. But underneath URPMI is still RPM; the file system a

    • Re:Missing One? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Quobobo ( 709437 )
      Does "not final" and "if people want to ante in to try this with their favorite distro" mean nothing to you?

    • Dude, where's my brain? (Score:5, Funny)

      by SuperBanana ( 662181 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:35PM (#8166185)
      Where's Mandrake?

      Dude, I know you're not supposed to read the story, but at least read the text you quoted.

      This list is not final and if people want to ante in to try this with their favorite distro, let us know at bc2004 at osuosl dot org or in #beaverchallenge on the Freenode.net IRC network.

      Note what's implied...

      • The list is not final
      • Someone needs to carry the banner for each distro(ie, someone who knows the distro needs to set it up properly etc).
      • You can volunteer your favorite distro AND volunteer to be the guy carrying the banner.
      • They give you both an email addr and an IRC channel to discuss all of this

    • Re:Missing One? (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What I want to know is where is Emacs :-)

    • Re:Missing One? (Score:2, Informative)

      by xeeno ( 313431 )
      I see 6 linux distributions and 3 BSDs.

      You do realize that there are OTHER operating systems out there, right?

      You would think that the difference between the linux distros would be trivial at best, with the exception of gentoo. Why 6?

      Isn't there a free beos out there now?

  • Sex on the brain (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jason Earl ( 1894 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:01PM (#8165973) Homepage Journal
    First a story about screws, now a story about beavers. Apparently the /. crew had a slow weekend.

  • What wil they be benchmarking? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MysteriousMystery ( 708469 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:04PM (#8165995)
    Will they be benchmarking database performance, GCC compiling speed, I took at look at the methodology page and it wasn't particularly specific.
    • You miss Parallel Processing and Clustering Capabilities, Graphical Prowess and things like support for realtime apps.

      Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of each of those things! Wonder how they would be :)

    • Re:What wil they be benchmarking? (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Oh, man. Didn't you RTFA? Eugenia Loli-Queru is the head judge. After all the intensive speed-tweaking and optimization, the whole thing will be judged based on the colors used in the default theme. Extra points if it looks like BeOS.

      [note to the humor-impaired: it's funny; laugh. I happen to really like BeOS]
    • No, no, they're just going to see how fast they can make it go overall! Even a CEO knows that you always optimize for all possible scenarios. That way nobody can accuse them of focusing on just one application. (Benchmarks lie, so the best bet is to just make it go faster and skip the benchmarks.)
    • Will they be benchmarking database performance, GCC compiling speed, I took at look at the methodology page and it wasn't particularly specific.

      It's OSNews... they'll be "benchmarking" how quickly you can change the default colour scheme of the desktop.

    • this! (Score:2, Funny)

      by gunpowder ( 614638 ) *
      Bogomips

      'nuff said.

  • A Cool Idea, But... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Hornsby ( 63501 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:07PM (#8166016) Homepage
    This is a really neat idea, and it's a long time coming; however, I wouldn't expect overly divergent results among Linux distributions. Afterall, they're all going to use the latest 2.4 and 2.6 kernel and comparable glibc versions(with maybe the exception of Debian), so the only speed difference should be in the compiler flags used to build the packages. I'm not trying to negate the coolness of this competition because it should give a good measure of performance between the BSD distros VS Linux distros, but don't be surprised when the Linux distros all show comparable results. As a footnote, I do expect Gentoo to come in the lead of the Linux distros having tried them all and found it the fastest in empircal testing...

    • Re:A Cool Idea, But... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:28PM (#8166141)
      However, I wouldn't expect overly divergent results among Linux distributions.

      Whoever puts their apps in the latter sectors of disk and uses the first sectors for writing will win by a margin of 2:1, provided no one else does the same. On the other hand, if one group makes use of a nice mfs and no one else does then that group might win by a much larger margin. Depending on the test, selective use of processors or placing swap in just the right space may make a big difference as well. Maybe it'll depend on which team gets a Hacker to, in 3 days, recode specific routines in assembly just for that processor setup.

      In short, welcome to the real world of benchmarking: whichever team figures out how to bend the rules just right will win.
      This kind of benchmark rule bending happens quite often when the big players get rfp's for large orders from bigger players, and ppl make lots of money figuring out how to bend the benchmark rules, even when those rules cover well over a hundred pages of specifications.

      • Are you saying it's a good idea to partition / at the *end* of the disk? That sounds like an interesting thing to try, actually. Traditionally I've always had it somewhere near the start, after the swap and boot.

      • In short, welcome to the real world of benchmarking: whichever team figures out how to bend the rules just right will win.

        Very interesting. It would be cool to have a benchmark with five times exactly the same distro, except the competing teams don't know this.

        It would be nice to see if the differences achieved were comparable to what the differences between distros will be in this test.

    • Re:A Cool Idea, But... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by akb ( 39826 )
      I wonder how much variation there will be in each team's ability to optimize the boxes, ie, which team is the better tweaker. Maybe this will be more of a determining factor in the outcome than the distro or OS used.
    • that all depends on what they are testing. In general gentoos only major advantages are:

      1. Portage. Its better for most than apt or rpm.

      2. Responsiveness. Large apps that are compiled for a specific archetecture tend to work faster. Mozilla and evolution are noticably faster on my home system than on my work system (athlon 1.4 vs p4 1.4 same ram, same hard-drive speeds [hdparm -Tt]) which runs redhat.

      Portage is also gentoo's major weakness IMHO they have to many scripters working on it, which is

      • Re:A Cool Idea, But... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Aardpig ( 622459 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @11:24PM (#8166441)

        It wouldnt take much to offer "up an running in 10 minutes" iso's to people with a default set of apps, portage & tree etc

        What, you mean like the 2-disk Live CD [gentoo.org] option offered by, erm, what's its name, Gentoo Linux [gentoo.org]? Sure, there's a bit of tweaking to do, but almost everything is precompiled. Too much for you? Then perhaps Gentoo's not for you.

        • Too much for me ? I suppose if i was insulted i would argue that point, insted I'm going to re-iterate my point:
          Why exactly doesnt gentoo have an installer ? Why is it that you have to go through all of this retarded crap to install an OS, even slack has an installer.

          I have been using gentoo since before 1.0, but this is getting old. especially now that they are starting to add config files for programs that dont use configs, and add directories for everything, and have shit spread out all to high hel

          • Why exactly doesnt gentoo have an installer ?

            I tend to regard Gentoo as Linux From Scratch with some neat package management scripts. I loved LFS, since it taught me quite a bit about the nuts and bolts of a Linux distro; however, I ended up writing my own package management scripts, which became tedious to maintain. Gentoo fills this hole perfectly; it has the "build your own" feel, but makes the package management a doddle.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • I can pretty much tell you who's going to be the fastest and slowest without a doubt. Gentoo fastest OpenBSD slowest (I don't even use Gentoo btw).

        OpenBSD should be the slowest, since it adds security checks to the execution of code. OTOH, it 'feels' faster then 2.4.x Debian on low end hardware.

        OTOH, I don't know if I'd reward Gentoo as 'the fastest'. FreeBSD is wicked fast and can easily be compiled from source.

        If we are picking categories, can we include setup time as well? Say, time from a

        • As a footnote: I wish someone who really knew windows would set up a Windows 2k3 and Windows 2k Server/Desktop machines, just to see how they compare.

          Depending on the benchmarks, that might be tricky. They don't appear to be letting on what these benchmarks will be, but it's quite probable that some of the software they choose will not be available on Windows, or only via Cygwin (which introduces a not inconsiderable overhead).

          And, of course, including Windows would only encourage the trolls on both si
      • I wouldn't be all that sure about your predictions.

        There are many things we don't know yet:

        - What is going to be measured?
        - How are measurements going to be weighted to compute the final score?
        - What systems are participating?

        The list of participating systems is not final yet. There are other systems out there besides *BSD and GNU/Linux. I could imagine an embedded Linux (without the weigt of a full GNU userland) beating the other Linuxen.

        Certain things are pretty inefficient under UNIX and like s

    • Re:A Cool Idea, But... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by scotch ( 102596 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @11:34PM (#8166494) Homepage
      Nice Troll. You had me going until this bit:

      I do expect Gentoo to come in the lead of the Linux distros having tried them all and found it the fastest in empircal testing...

      Beautiful.

      Back a while, when gentoo was still had the smell of pop novelty, you would hear all this great stuff about how gentoo distros were the fastest, something about being able to specify --funroll-all-the-bad-loopies and --enable-r0xor-opts and --omit-random-instructions to the compiler. Of course, all these claims of gentoo's speed have never been backed up. On the contrary, the only results we've seen published tend to indicate that you average gentoo distro is composed of slower-than-average or average applications.

      These days, we hear the new mantras of the gentoo-fanboys: it's not the speed (good thing!) that they use gentoo for, but instead the ease of use or robust package management or configuration flexibility. That's great and all, but it's all a bunch of green-is-my-favorite-color kind of advocacy: opinionated, unsupported, and unconvincing. People who've gone through the long laborious pain of installing gentoo (reminiscent of slackware 3.0 and libc upgrades, what year is it again?), and then having wasted the effort on a system that will probably spend more cycles compiling itself than serving the users, they justify the waste with a belief that their system is better managed or more finely tuned or whatever. Emphasis on whatever.

      Of course, none of the supposed benefits of gentoo are backed with anything approaching rigorous analysis. Instead we get vague anecdotes and slashdot fanboyism. When we inevitably learn that the gentoo portage system is riddled with problems, conflicting package maintenance mechanisms and policy, broken and overtweaked package scripts, and that the whole thing needs a certain amount of voodoo to work, the gentoo boys will probably come up with some other reason why it is the one distro to rule them all.

      The rest of will just wait for the results of your empirical studies with smiles on our faces!

      • Re:A Cool Idea, But... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by 1lus10n ( 586635 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2004 @12:01AM (#8166620) Journal
        "When we inevitably learn that the gentoo portage system is riddled with problems, conflicting package maintenance mechanisms and policy, broken and overtweaked package scripts, and that the whole thing needs a certain amount of voodoo to work"

        You know this is one of the better descriptions of portage/Gentoo I have heard. If I had the time/resources I would re-write portage using a bette langauge and more sane feature set. Portage was a good idea, and is a HORRIBLE implementation. however it still beats RPM.

        PS somebody mod the parent up, I would have modded you up, but I already posted to this topic.

        • Re:A Cool Idea, But... (Score:5, Insightful)

          by acidtripp101 ( 627475 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2004 @02:26AM (#8167125)
          Advice: Read the HUNDREDS of posts on the gentoo forums about this.

          The fact of the matter is that portage is plenty fast. Any speed boosts given to the actual emerge program set would be negligable because of the sheer amount of time dedicated to compiling.

          More Advice: Stop trolling.

          When you say that "Portage was a good idea, and is a HORRIBLE implementation" you really need to enumerate WHY it's a horrible implementation.
          Take this common troll as an example.
          Example 1: Windows is a HORRIBLE OS.
          Example 2: Windows is a HORRIBLE OS because being locked into the choices Microsoft made in my "interests" are usually counter-productive.

          See the difference? Example 1, while in many people's oppinion is valid, leaves people wondering why Windows is horrible. Example 2 gives anybody reading specific evidence and also allows anybody that wants to defend the point areas to do so.

          I love the way that gentoo handles packages. I, admitingly, have a BSD bias, but it still allows my system to be what I want.
          The feature set is anything but 'insane,' but once again, I have no idea why you think so, so I can't exactly defend that against any reasons you have.

          Reply to this post and we might actually have some decent points to give to the gentoo team to make inprovements.

          • Re:A Cool Idea, But... (Score:2, Interesting)

            by 1lus10n ( 586635 )
            okay if you say so:

            1) Python should not be used for a package management tool. It has to much process time involved in processing dependancies. (as an addendum python itself is DAMN slow when compared to a compiled language. google for it, the I/O handling on python is sub-par when compared to C/C++)

            2) no useful installer.

            3) to many damn scripts. send a coder to do the job you get one modular peice of code and a few libraries. send a scripter and you get hundreds of little scripts scattered from h

            • Re:A Cool Idea, But... (Score:3, Insightful)

              by Anonymous Coward
              1. Unless you're using a computer more than 10 years old, you're not going to be waiting for Portage to calculate dependancies for any significant amount of time. I wouldn't mind Gentoo developers optimizing Portage for speed, but only trolls or the most anal-retentive of users will be put off by it's "inefficiency".

              2. RTFM. Gentoo docs are very easy to follow, and it only needs to be done once. I'm sure that typing in a command or two is not going to kill you.

              3. Emerge, as far as the end user is concerne
        • You know this is one of the better descriptions of portage/Gentoo I have heard. If I had the time/resources I would re-write portage using a bette langauge and more sane feature set.

          Like a language designed to calculate and traverse production rule dependencies with the ability to call arbitrary shell commands on those dependencies? [freebsd.org] Good enough for more than 10,000 ports.

          All right, it's far from perfect, but for what it's designed to do, it's ideal. Maybe if there was an implementation of ant in C...
      • I agree with all of the above, but as a gentoo fanboy I run Gentoo for two reasons

        1: Portage
        2: To update all the software on my system to something that was released less than 72 hours ago with one command (emerge world)

        Of course this has absolutely wrecked my installation on a number of occasions, but I kind of like it. It keeps the skills sharp and lets you figure out how to solve problems that you never knew existed in linux (gnu/linux whatever).

        BBH
        • Maybe you should run gentoo in a vmware container then. So you can roll back if something breaks ;).

          Or just back up before you emerge world.

          So far I haven't had major breakages with the equivalent on FreeBSD 4.x (make buildworld etc). Lucky I guess.
      • If it takes voodoo magic to get Gentoo running I must be living in a voodoo doctor's hut because my roommate and I are looking at over a dozen systems running from Gentoo; from desktops to servers to home theater PCs, laptops, routers... I've spent a decent amount of time with RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, SuSe, Caldera, and Gentoo and the latter is where I ended up and stayed.

        Maybe someday someone will make a Gentoo install CD on par with Mandrake 9.2 or the latest Fedora, but if you're queasy about compiling

  • Beaver? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Omni Magnus ( 645067 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:08PM (#8166030)
    If they really wanted to make it a good competition, they would award beaver to the winner. That would get them fired up.

  • Better than what OSNews has been doing (Score:4, Insightful)

    by El Volio ( 40489 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:10PM (#8166045) Homepage
    Given OSNews' recent penchant for poorly-done benchmarks (e.g. 1 [slashdot.org], 2 [slashdot.org]), I'm glad to see them run an article about someone else's (hopefully well-done) testing. By having expert teams who know what they're doing tweak the configurations, this should be a much more representative result. Hopefully OSNews will learn some methodology from these guys...

  • True Real World Benchmark results (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    The only way to get real world benchmark results would be to distribute the benchmarks setiathome style and then do some funky statitical analysis. But you'd also need a way to verify the actual hardware used for each test.

    Otherwise, we still end up with data that needs to be heavily interpreted to get any take on what will happen in production on any given hardware.

    Oh yeah, not to mention that for real world production, performance is also dependant on maintainability, uptime and a variety of other fact

  • Why not include Windows and perhaps others? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by enosys ( 705759 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:29PM (#8166150) Homepage
    Why not include Windows and perhaps others? I guess they wouldn't include non-open-source ones because it's a site about open source but I'd love to see the comparison. Have any other sites done that?

  • Pity Windows is not included (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Mostly a lurker ( 634878 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:31PM (#8166163)
    Comprison of various Linux distros (and of the 2.4 versus 2.6 kernel) is interesting. However, what is really lacking is an objective comparison of MS Windows Server 2003 versus Linux. I know Microsoft tries to prevent such benchmarking, but can they really enforce such a ban? It ought to be possible to find a team of Windows experts to tune Windows so the comparison is fair. Why not?

  • Linux Junkie: (Score:5, Funny)

    by iammaxus ( 683241 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:32PM (#8166166)
    This is clearly a plot by Microsoft and SCO to destroy OSS! They couldn't beat any one of us, but if they get us to fight each other...

  • Testing Framework (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Linus Sixpack ( 709619 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:34PM (#8166183) Journal
    I have to confess to being more interested in the universality of the testing framework than any of the results. Whatever is done I hope it leads to some standards for future, lower profile but perhaps more useful benchmarks.

    An accepted cross distro testing criteria would be nice.

    ls
  • Come on, if it's built by Dell in 3min the
    PS/2 & USB controller will die, 3hrs the HDD controller will fail & wipe each HDD, but in 3 days they'll replace them with the equivelant Compaq or clone machine....

    Flamebait I know... Am I Ashamed? No

    : )

  • Beaver Challenge 2004 (Score:5, Funny)

    by tfoss ( 203340 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:43PM (#8166233)
    I'm just sure there's a joke here somewhere.

    -Ted

  • They have failed to say which RAID controller is installed in the PowerEdge 2650, but I'm assuming it's the default Adaptec ROMB PERC 3/Di card. Following development of this driver on linux, there are issues with Linux and this driver [dell.com]. While I'm for a fair benchmark, this will most likely effect the Linux results.

    A controller card agreeable to all OSs/Distros would be a good idea (if such a thing is even possible).

    There are lies, damn lies, and benchmarks. I'm sure different configurations would produc
    • I'm seeing 279 days of uptime on both my 2650s running a very minimal install of RH7.2 with some (not all) errata packages applied, kernel is 2.4.18-24.8.0smp, a tad behind the bleeding edge, but serviceable nontheless.

      They both have 100+ Gb RAID5 on Perc3/Di controllers, and are running a reasonably demanding application (Apache/Jakarta/Servlet, MySQL, Verity K2 with ~20Gb in collections so far..)

      from the build documentation that I wrote 281 days ago:

      *
      * WARNING - RedHat 7.2 does not autodetect
      * Perc3/D

  • I don't see Darwin (Score:5, Interesting)

    by droleary ( 47999 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:47PM (#8166256) Homepage
    What's with the x86- and Linux-centric approach? Do we really need to see how 6 different distributions can be tweaked to behave like one another on the same $4300 piece of hardware? I'd be extremely interested to see a G5 Xserve entered into that mix, although you'd clearly have to add some unnecessary doo-dads to the Mac to bring the price over $4000 (even with hardware RAID and the inability to drop below an 80GB HD to the 18GB like the Dell has, I could only bring a single processor Xserve up to $3500). Include a PPC Linux or two while you're at it. As it stands, the results will probably be at least a 6-way yawn-fest.
    • Well besides the fact that they are comparing OS's that will run on 1 specific computer (which OSX doesnt) you could also cover a myraid of different things:

      1. 64 bit binaries are slower, G5 is a 64bit proc. (although Im not sure if apple has used the Open Source code to make their OS 64 bits yet)
      2. The G5 procs are one of the top three avail in the market, (alpha and athlon64 would be my other guesses .... actually alpha IS the best for most stuff, athlon64 i haven't seen personally yet) xeon's are NO
    • In all fairness, you can't get the Xserve to include dual power supplies for any amount of money. Or love, for that matter. In a machine of that nature, that's otherwise quite nice, this was an inexcusable lapse in design judgement - especially since its been complained about since the first Xserve. I mean, lose another one of the drives (still allowing for 250gb mirrored, for anything else there's Xserve RAID after all) for the space if you have to.

  • Include other OSes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Quixote ( 154172 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:54PM (#8166286) Homepage Journal
    They should include other OSes, with the stipulation that all tweaks, etc. done by the engineers be well-documented and reproducible.

  • Recycle Bin Performance? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @10:55PM (#8166289)
    "In this competition they will be allowing a community of experts in each OS to tweak their configurations to ensure maximum performance."

    I can see it now, teams of KDE and GNOME developers going head to head to see who can come up with the best color scheme, antialiased fonts, and 'Are you sure you want to delete this?' dialog box. Followed by Round 2, where each group has to compile something built for the other camp's desktop, whoever can fight through the dependencies quicker wins!

    Lord Linus, save us from OSNews.

  • What? (Score:5, Funny)

    by blair1q ( 305137 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @11:06PM (#8166356) Journal
    just imagine... well you know.

    What?

    Just imagine what?

    A Beowulf cluster of Beavers?

  • Hyper Threading (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SunBug ( 31218 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @11:07PM (#8166358)
    Will they let you tweak Hyper Threading?

    It'll be interesting to see how many people turn Hyper Threading OFF when doing some tests. I found that my database was 212% FASTER for read operations after I turned Hyper Threading off on the 2650.

    • Re:Hyper Threading (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Graelin ( 309958 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2004 @02:44AM (#8167185)
      If you enable HT, you are cutting your L3 cache in half per "processor." So your 2.5Ghz Xeon with 512k cache turns into two 2.5ghz chips with 256k each.

      We have deployed a few 6650s here, these are Quad Xeons with 1 meg of cache, and it's amazing to look at top reporting 8 procs. But it didn't take long before we saw the same thing you have.

      But it depends on your usage patterns too. If you're serving a lot of small requests - that run very quickly - HT may not be a bad idea. OTOH, running fewer and larger requests would certainly benefit from disabling HT.

      The reason is that database servers can take advantage of large cache sizes more than most apps. They can move a lot of the dataset near the proc and cut down on query times dramatically. Less cache, more RAM accesses, slower queries.

      About a year ago Dell was recommending that HT be disabled for better performance. Not sure if that is still the case today.

      • Re:Hyper Threading (Score:5, Informative)

        by slamb ( 119285 ) on Tuesday February 03, 2004 @03:29AM (#8167315) Homepage
        If you enable HT, you are cutting your L3 cache in half per "processor." So your 2.5Ghz Xeon with 512k cache turns into two 2.5ghz chips with 256k each.

        Interesting. That's not the reason for disabling HyperThreading that I've heard. I often hear people say it should be disabled unless you have a scheduler that supports HyperThreading well. There are lots of opportunities to go wrong when scheduling tasks on HT-enabled CPUs.

        For example, if you have one real processor and are running a high-priority task and a low-priority task, the low-priority task will get 50% of the processor time with a non-HT aware scheduler, since it says "well, I've got this processor free, so I might as well use it" when that's not really true. This problem is discussed more here [kerneltrap.org].

        Similarly, if you've got several high-performance tasks and several real processors, you want to spread them out across as many real processors as possible to maximize parallelism.

  • Blatantly Rigged Contest (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 02, 2004 @11:26PM (#8166445)
    This contest is blatantly set up so that Gentoo, the obvious victor in a fair benchmarking contest, cannot win.

    They are only allowing three days to set up the OS, everyone knows that you can't get gentoo installed, much less customized in that time.

  • Beaver Challenge? (Score:3, Funny)

    by bytesmythe ( 58644 ) <bytesmythe@gmailMOSCOW.com minus city> on Tuesday February 03, 2004 @01:10AM (#8166892)
    "Open source" has taken on a whole new meaning since Hustler got involved...

  • These are closer to value server platform...
    2 Procs - comodity, lets see how the various distros do on 16-64 way servers
    2 GB RAM ? why so limiting - lets get this up to 64 GB - or more

    The disk system might not be too bad - but hardware Raid 5 would be more realistic

    Of course what they are going to do is figure out which distro runs a FPS with the highest frame rate

  • Round 2 (Score:2, Interesting)

    by zaba ( 746842 )
    So, after we're done with the $4300 machine (which, arguably, is cool because you see these OSes at the top of their game), how about a benchmark that is the antithesis of this? What can all the "experts" do given a $430 machine? (Of course, a benchmark against Windows would be in order... and the price of whatever version of Windows is running should be included)

    If one of the reasons to run the benchmark is to show people how great F/OSS is, "round 2" seems like a natural. After all, don't we all know so

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