[Zope] Python on Sun cf Linux/Intel

[Stuart 'Zen' Bishop]

On Sat, 6 Nov 1999, Dr. Ross Lazarus wrote:

> Two examples - taken from real boxes running real jobs. The bigger box
> was running more/other tasks than the littler one but load average never
> got beyond 1.0. Note that the Lintel box was a midvintage PII350 (92mB
> ram !) server running a squid proxy - surely not twice as fast as a
> lightly loaded dual cpu sun ?.

If your only benchmark is CPU grunt, in Australia an UltraSparcII will 
cost 50-100% more than the equivalent Intel based box (assuming quality 
namebrand hardware, same support levels & warrenty etc). 

> Pystone(1.1) time for 10000 passes = 5.57
> This machine benchmarks at 1795.33 pystones/second
> 
> On the LIntel box it was: 
> 
> Pystone(1.1) time for 10000 passes = 2.36
> This machine benchmarks at 4237.29 pystones/second

Pystones seems to be a single threaded CPU benchmark. For raw CPU grunt,
a PII350 will outperform an UltraII 250, and possibly an UltraII 450. You
didn't mention what speed the sun's CPU's are running, and what architecture
(sparc, ultrasparc, ultrasparcII). Squid won't effect the pystones reading
much - it generally doesn't need much cpu time.

> Exhibit 2:
> A self timing site generating (zclass based - no ZSQL) zope script on a
> Linuxtel box with 
> Python 1.5.2 (#1, Apr 14 1999, 10:34:26)  [GCC 2.7.2.3] on linux2 took
> 1min:10sec.
> 
> On a dual cpu Sun called sin, (running Python 1.5.2 (#1, Oct 13 1999,
> 11:11:12)  [GCC 2.95.1 19990816 (release)]) on sun os5, it took
> 2min:48sec.

Try running four or five of these scripts simultaneously and see what 
happens. You will then see if the second CPU in the sun helps significantly.

You may be correct about gcc on sparc being slow - I believe that much
more of gcc's tuning has been done with i386 code rather than sparc
code. We build entirely with sun's cc and CC here.

On this note, has anyone got any canned Zope 'excercise' programs? I
need to do some stress tests in various configurations (raw zserver,
via apache, via apache ssl, with zodb on a nfs mount from the NetApp,
with zodb on local disk, performance improvements with memory increase)

 ___
   //     Zen (alias Stuart Bishop)     Work: zen@cs.rmit.edu.au
  // E N  Senior Systems Alchemist      Play: zen@shangri-la.dropbear.id.au
 //__     Computer Science, RMIT 	 WWW: http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~zen