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Testing on old hardware is flawedTesting on old hardware is flawedPosted Aug 26, 2004 11:47 UTC (Thu) by hensema (guest, #980)In reply to: Testing on old hardware is flawed by Fats Parent article: Looking at reiser4
No, what I'm saying is that a disk is dog slow compared to a CPU. It pays to invest some extra CPU cycles to prevent unnescesary disk seeks. Packing data more tightly on disk helps too.
On a slow CPU with a relatively fast disk this doesn't work. Here you can affort to do some extra seeks or waste some space on disk. Therefore, reiser4 is optimized for current and future systems and won't give optimal performance on older systems like the one used for the little lwn.net benchmark.
Also, CPU usage is generally part of a good benchmark. It's even part of really bad ones, like untarring a kernel :-)
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Testing on old hardware is flawed Posted Aug 26, 2004 17:12 UTC (Thu) by NAR (subscriber, #1313) [Link] I'm not sure that the CPU speed/disk speed ratio differs that much between the lwn.net test machine and the test machine you asked for. From your reasing I'd think reiser4 should be faster on old machines because there the disk is really slow. However, I might be wrong.
Testing on old hardware is flawed Posted Aug 26, 2004 21:22 UTC (Thu) by hensema (guest, #980) [Link] No, on old machines the disk is actually relatively fast. In absolute figures the disk is slow, maybe 10 MB/sec or slightly less. But current processors are more than 10-20 times faster while disks are only 4-5 times faster. And that's measured by throughput. Seeks are barely any faster than 4 years ago (they are mostly limited by the rotational speed of the platters).
Testing on old hardware is flawed Posted Sep 3, 2004 10:19 UTC (Fri) by gc (guest, #24112) [Link] Recent CPUs have very high frequencies but the counterpart is that they need more clock cycles to perform the same instructions. If you compare a P4-3GHz with a P3-300MHz, the clock ticks needed to execute a typical series of instructions is 3 to 4 times larger, hence the CPU power is overally "only" 3 times higher. I think your figures concerning the increase of CPU power are wrong.
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