On Tue, Jun 05, 2001 at 08:33:16AM +0100, James Sutherland wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Jun 2001, Jamie Walker wrote:
>
> > On Mon, Jun 04, 2001 at 06:32:37PM -0400, David Merrill wrote:
> >
> > > Linuxers cried foul because system tuning wasn't done properly on the
> > > Linux box.
> >
> > The other point was that the hardware spec and indeed the tests run were
> > very atypical. There can't be many Web sites out there serving static-only
> > pages over four 100 megabit ethernet cards.
>
> Good point - SPECweb includes a fairly large proportion of dynamic
> content, to make it a bit more realistic. Tests these days are being done
> on machines with 32Gb of RAM and 8 Gigabit Ethernet cards serving about
> 66% static content from big RAID arrays, which IMHO is getting a bit
> silly: are there *ANY* sites serving 8 Gbit/sec of content from a single
> server?!?
This, like most benchmarks, is valid as long as you carefully look at
what it is measuring. It isn't *intended* to measure real-world
throughput. It is *intended* to make the network speed irrelevant, so
that the throughput of the machine *itself* is being measured. That
was, I believe, the point of having excess bandwidth.
Of course, that also makes the results of the test irrelevant in
real-world systems.
Lies, damned lies, statistics, and benchmarks, dontcha know. :-)
--
Dr. David C. Merrill http://www.lupercalia.net
Linux Documentation Project [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Collection Editor & Coordinator http://www.linuxdoc.org
The steady state of disks is full.
-- Ken Thompson
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