[ Thanks to Barry McFadden for this
link. ]
“The last time we got together, we took a brief look into the
technology behind hyper-threading and performance with a variety of
Windows benchmarks. At the end of that article I vowed to bring you
the Linux side of the story at a later date. Well friends, that
time has arrived.“Since the last installment, my testbed has strengthened
considerably with the addition of 2x 3.2GHz Xeons with 1MB of L3
cache and a 3.2E Pentium 4 ‘Prescott’. The latter has received an
upgrade of hyper-threading technology and Intel was kind enough to
let us take a look at the impact it may have on Linux
performance.“Anyone who’s ever set out to perform Linux benchmarks quickly
realizes the difficulties involved in such an undertaking, not only
with the availability of quality benchmarks (or lack thereof), but
also in the way the test system(s) are configured. Most of the
Linux benchmarks that I see on hardware review sites are simple
things like kernel compiles or povray… maybe a game benchmark or
two. Those certainly have merit, but I wanted to try to do things
differently for this article. I wanted to get more involved with
server-oriented benchmarks to really see what hyper-threading
brings to that market. Don’t get me wrong, we’re still going to
take a look at compiling performance and even media-encoding
performance, but those won’t be the most interesting results you’ll
see here today…”