[Zope] Python on Sun cf Linux/Intel

[Andreas Kostyrka]

On Sun, Nov 07, 1999 at 01:44:02PM +1100, Dr. Ross Lazarus wrote:
> Benchmarks are always problematic. It seems pretty clear that pystone is
> single threaded and doesn't do "justice" to dual cpu's. It's also clear
> that any serious benchmarks should run multiple threads to compare
> machines under load when running zope tasks.
> 
> But, I still have trouble understanding why a single zope task takes
> twice as long on the lightly loaded midrange Sun as a low end LIntel box
> ! 
> 
> It's a typical development task - make 70 complex pages from zclasses
> with thousands of elements. I don't want it to run multithread ! Coming
> from a PC background, I always thought that we bought "big iron" minis
> because they gave better throughput for everything - sure, it's not that
> simple and the big iron will no doubt do much better under heavier
> load.... 
Well, the problem is, that the big iron excells mostly on:
-) IO bandwidth.
-) High avail. stuff. (Sometimes going as far as hotplugging CPUs ;) )
-) heavy load.
-) Scaling.

Basically, while you might see better benchmarks with a PC and EIDE drives,
when you put the pressure of multiuser usage on it, the PC quickly breaks,
while the big iron nicely chucks along.

On the anectodal level:
You can even see it with PCs, where I only once tried to replace old SCSI
drives with a new (and at least 3 times faster in all categories) EIDE drive
in a multiuser (X Terminal users via xdm) server. The box was faster with
one user. With two users it was bad, and with three users the interactive
performance was inacceptable. Well after one week, the box did have SCSI drives
again ;)

> 
> FWIW, I'm moving all my development to the $2k LIntel box until I get
> faster (raw, single threaded !) response elsewhere....
Well, the problem here is, that you should try to benchmark some easy page
which with Zope is almost never completly static (standard_html_header/footer)
with ab (Apache benchmark), and let do multiple requests at the same time.

That is a more practical Zope benchmark then pystone. ;)

Andreas
-- 
Andreas Kostyrka                     | andreas@mtg.co.at
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