Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxl!ihnp4!zehntel!hplabs!sri-unix!smh@SRI-PRISM.ARPA From: smh@SRI-PRISM.ARPA Newsgroups: net.unix Subject: Re: performance of VAX/780/750 Pyramid & SUN (longish) Message-ID: <12378@sri-arpa.UUCP> Date: Mon, 13-Aug-84 08:13:02 EDT Article-I.D.: sri-arpa.12378 Posted: Mon Aug 13 08:13:02 1984 Date-Received: Thu, 16-Aug-84 01:31:32 EDT Lines: 113 From: "Scott M. Hinnrichs"I was pleased at the results these comparison benchmarks came up with so I requested a copy from Partha to run on our Pyramid 90x. Needless to say, we came up with similar results. Partha (at SUNY) did not say what the configuration of the Pyramid (or VAX, or SUN) were, but I was anxious to see how our 90X faired. We have 8 meg of memory, a Data-cache, 2 swap devices, and the O/Sx 2.3 release software (which can all make a difference in performance measurements). Here are the results of running Partha's benchmarks on our Pyramid 90x vs. his results. We were running an incremental dump at the time. We also have a program (nice 20) running all the time computing pi to 10,000,000 places soaking up spare cpu. :-) 1) C-CARD User-CPU System-CPU Elapsed Time Pyramid (SRI) 2.6s 0.0s 2s Pyramid (SUNY) 3.4s 0.1s 4s VAX-11/780 6.8s 0.1s -- VAX-11/750 13.3s 0.1s 14s SUN 13.9s 0.1s 14s 2) P-CARD User-CPU System-CPU Elapsed Time Pyramid (SRI) 2.6s 0.0s 2s Pyramid (SUNY) 3.4s 0.1s 4s VAX-11/780 23.2s 1.0s -- VAX-11/750 32.5s 0.4s 33s SUN 41.0s 0.4s 42s 3) GREP User-CPU System-CPU Elapsed Time Pyramid (SRI) 2.6s 0.4s 3s Pyramid (SUNY) 3.3s 0.5s 4s VAX-11/780 3.4s 0.8s -- VAX-11/750 6.8s 0.9s 8s SUN 6.8s 0.9s 8s 4) SWAP User-CPU System-CPU Elapsed Time Pyramid (SRI) 4.8s 2.8s 0:08s (!) Pyramid (SUNY) 5.4s 5.9s 0:58s VAX-11/780 13.6s 11.5s ----- VAX-11/750 22.7s 23.1s 1:30s SUN 33.1s 158.0s 5:56s High-Load Tests The high-load tests were fun. While the 5 process SWAP test was going I attempted to run emacs. It took 16 seconds for emacs to load my .emacs_pro.mo and read in /etc/termcap (usually takes 3 seconds). After emacs came up it was quite responsive and there did not seem to be any delay in screen updating. Even though the 90X shines on individual benchmarks, I think the real benefit we have found is responsiveness under (simulated) heavy loads. 1) C-CARD (20 processes) User-CPU System-CPU Elapsed Time Pyramid (SRI) 2.6s 0.0s 0:47s (!) Pyramid (SUNY) 3.4s 0.1s 1:04s VAX-11/780 6.8s 0.2s 2:15s VAX-11/750 13.4s 0.4s 4:37s SUN 16.0s 0.6s 5:28s 2) P-CARD (20 processes) User-CPU System-CPU Elapsed Time Pyramid (SRI) 2.6s 0.0s 46s (!) Pyramid (SUNY) 3.4s 0.1s 1:06s VAX-11/780 -- No Data -- VAX-11/750 33.5s 0.6s 11:10s SUN 47.8s 3.9s 16:00s 3) GREP (20 processes) User-CPU System-CPU Elapsed Time Pyramid (SRI) 2.6s 0.4s 48s (!) Pyramid (SUNY) 4.0s 0.5s 1:20s VAX-11/780 3.5s 0.9s 1:20s VAX-11/750 7.0s 0.8s 2:45s SUN 7.5s 1.4s 2:50s 4) SWAP (N processes) User-CPU System-CPU Elapsed Time SRI (3 procs) 4.9s 6.3s 2:25s SUNY(3 procs) 5.9s 6.0s 2:30s VAX-11/780(") 14.0s 14.0s 3:40s VAX-11/750(") 23.5s 23.1s 4:26s SUN 35.6s 104.0s 13:00s SRI (5 procs) 4.9s 6.7s 4:17s (Max 10 procs) SUNY(5 procs) 5.9s 6.0s 4:17s (Max 5 procs) VAX-11/780(") -- Pooped out -- (Max 3 procs) From these tests it is obvious that there is an advantage to the Data-Cache, an additional swap device, and 8 Meg of memory. The final results of this test gave similar results to 2 other benchmark suites we have run here. The overall average performance of the Pyramid 90x approaches 2.6 x VAX-11/780. Worst case I have found since installing the Data-Cache was 1.26 x VAX-11/780, and the best is 4.8 x VAX-11/780 (former was a Prolog Interpreter, the latter was passing a single int parameter on a 10e+06 iteration). Until Pyramid comes out with their GPIO hardware for speeding up (disk) I/O the machine will not realize it's full potential. One question for Partha, what happened to the data for the VAX-11/780 on many of the tests? We will soon be unleashing our entire user community on the 90X; I will try to give some reasonable impressions of the results. Scott M. Hinnrichs SRI International smh@sri-prism, sri-unix!sri-prism!smh