I tested this by untarring the mozilla source onto the local hard
drive, syncing, and rm -rf ing it.
The mozilla source is 91.6 megabytes untarred.
The results are astounding:
[ben@gilgamesh:/tmp]% time rm -rf mozilla 4:15PM
rm -rf mozilla 0.13s user 0.93s system 18% cpu 5.581 total
[ben@beowulf:/tmp]% time rm -rf mozilla 4:15PM
rm -rf mozilla 0.17s user 1.51s system 98% cpu 1.712 total
This is, frankly, terrible. Since when is IDE three times faster than
ultra-wide SCSI?
The first computer, gilgamesh, is a SCSI-based Pentium II/333 system;
using the aic7xxx driver version 5.1.4/3.2.4 for its Adaptec AHA-294X
Ultra Wide SCSI controller to control an IBM DDRS-39130W ultra-wide
drive.
The second computer, beowulf, is an IDE-based dual Pentium Pro/200
system, PIIX3 IDE controller, ST39140A IDE drive.
Both are compiled with SMP = 1.
One would think that the SCSI Pentium II/333 system, even though it's
single-processor, would have decent disk performance! Is there
something I'm missing?
So as to not spam the list with the .configs of the two machines,
I've put them up on the Web for your perusal:
http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/~ben/ide-config
http://csl.cse.ucsc.edu/~ben/scsi-config
What would cause this kind of performance loss?
For an interesting comparison, here's the same test on an UltraSPARC:
bash$ time rm -rf mozilla/
real 1.1
user 0.2
sys 0.7
Ben
-- Brought to you by the letters Z and X and the number 0. "You have my pills!" -- Grampa Simpson Debian GNU/Linux -- where do you want to go tomorrow? http://www.debian.org/ I'm on FurryMUCK as Che, and EFNet and YiffNet IRC as Che_Fox.- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/