[olug] OT-CPU Benchmarks

[Daniel Linder]

dthacker9 at cox.net said:
> I've been asked to get the specs for a Solaris server that we are looking
> at replacing.  I'm looking for a benchmark that would allow me to make a
> meaningful comparison of the processing power of hte SPARC chips in this 5
> year old server vs today's Intel/AMD/PPC chips.  Has anyone found a
> benchmark that they would consider accurate for this type of comparison?

Doing what?

As you have probably heard... "The best benchmark is the application you
are going to run on it."

If that is not possible, can you give us some hint as to what it does? 
What are the current systems limitations?

If your app is nearly 100% pure math, you could look at some of the LinPak
related math tests.  I think there is an informal test done by Wolfram
using their MathMatica (think electronic graph paper)...

If your app is heavy on the database side and/or disk IO, you can look to
see what programs like Bonnie or IOZone report.  Maybe even find the
ReiserFS benchmarking tools and try them.

Finally, if your app is doing network stuff, you could setup a Warez site
on the server and expose them to the Internet...THAT would give you a
boatload of traffic to look at! :)

Seriously, you could use NetCat to do some bandwidth testing from one
machine to another, but I'd hazzard a guess that even my old Athlon 1800
downstairs could keep a 100Mbit PCI link saturated...

If you want to see what bottlenecks are currently bogging the system, you
could use "sar" and other reporting tools to log the periodic health of
the system...

Of course that might show your boss that you *don't* really need the new
syste, just more RAM or other constrained resource... :O

-- 
Daniel Linder