Testing on old hardware is flawed

Testing on old hardware is flawed

Posted Aug 26, 2004 11:47 UTC (Thu) by bpearlmutter (subscriber, #14693)
In reply to: Testing on old hardware is flawed by Fats
Parent article: Looking at reiser4

No, that is not what he is saying at all.

Sometimes there is a tradeoff between thinking about where and how to put stuff on disk (CPU) and actual disk access. On a system like a mail server, you might expect the disk to be the bottleneck, with well below 100% CPU usage---at least, during periods when data is actually being moved on/off disk. This is precisely where, as the CPU/disk speed disparity grows, it makes sense to spend more CPU to optimise (reduce) actual disk access.

I don't know if reiserfs4 succeeds in this, but if it does it would be of particular advantage on something like a mail/news server. And, it would not be properly benchmarked if the CPU/disk speed disparity were unrealistically low.

Barak A. Pearlmutter <barak@cs.may.ie>
 Hamilton Institute, NUI Maynooth, Co. Kildare, Ireland
 http://www-bcl.cs.may.ie/~barak/

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