Anthony Awtrey
writes:
The Standard Performance
Evaluation Corporation is an organization whose mission is to
establish, maintain, and endorse a standardized set of relevant
benchmarks and metrics for performance evaluation of modern
computer systems. Linux has been featured in a number of stories
here about its performance in the SPECweb99 benchmarks. Other SPEC
benchmarks include CPU performance, mail server performance and
various Java performance benchmarks.
In August 2001, IBM submitted the first showing of a Linux OS
system in the Java Business Benchmark for evaluating the
performance of server-side Java. This category’s top performers
include 24 CPU OS/400 systems with scores in the 130,000 range. The
4 CPU linux box appeared last month in the middle of the list with
a score of 19,793. This is very interesting to me because next to
it at 20,259 is a very similar system running AS/400.
Both boxes are 4 CPU 600MHz PowerPC’s. The Linux installation is
actually running in a logical partition under OS/400. The note on
the Linux page reads:
“Linux on iSeries LPAR (logical partition) is the system under
test. For the iSeries products, OS/400 is the primary partition and
so consumes 0.1 CPUS (we report the test as ‘4’ CPUs). OS/400 will
do some nominal interrupt processing for the benchmark and is
required operationally. OS/400 also includes a hypervisor to share
one CPU 0.1 with itself and 3.9 for Linux.”
So what this seems to be saying is that Linux, running as a
client OS under OS/400, runs the same Java benchmark at
approximately 97.7% of OS/400 running the Java benchmark natively.
Wow.