benchmarks

[Haidut <haidut@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi all,

I've been planning on doing this for some time and it seems that I
have finally got around to it. Basically the plan is to benchmark
several major Unix-type OSs that are out there by using mostly the
"sysbench" utility (but suggestions are also welcome). The
participants are:

1. NexentaOS latest release (OpenSolaris + GNU/Debian user environment)
2. NetBSD latest release (3.1)
3. OpenBSD latest release (4.0)
4. Dfly latest release (1.8.1 as of 04/14/07)
5. FreeBSD 6.1
6. Linux 2.6.x (Ubuntu 6.06 LTS)

All operating systems will be installed independently (i.e. one OS
will be installed, the tests will run and then the partition will be
wiped so that the next OS can be installed on the same partition) on a
7200RPM ATA disk with 16MB of buffer, and will have a very basic
install plus the latest MySQL and PostgreSQL installed from the
respective binary packages. That's pretty much all that sysbench
requires to run.
The hardware is a 3.06 GHz Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM. The OSs will
be installed on the second primary partition of the disk and given
about 10GB of space for DB-related tasks. The first primary partition
will be swap of size 512MB.

I will be trying to run the same tests described in these articles:
http://software.newsforge.com/print.pl?sid=04/12/27/1243207
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/mysql.html

Since the system is a single CPU machine, there is probably no benefit
in running multiple threads, but if you think otherwise let me know.
There will be NO optimizations neither in kernel, filesystem or DB. I
am interested in the performance of the generic/vanilla install
because this is what 99% of the large scale deployments of any OS are
- generic and out of the box. So, if you have suggestions for other
benchmark tools that would run on all of these OS please let me know
so I can run those as well. I was thinking of trying "ubench" and
maybe GeekBench. The latter is available on Windows, Solaris and Linux
but I've been asking the authors to send me a statically compiled
binary, which should run under most BSDs using Linux binary
compatibility.
So suggestions for what tests/tools to run and how are very welcome.