[PLUG] Red Hat 8.0 Performance Comparison

Richard Steffens rsteff at attbi.com
Thu Dec 5 00:55:11 UTC 2002


I spoke too soon the other day when I thought that the new kernel I
compiled for my desktop machine combined with some additional memory
solved that machine's performance problem. Alas, it still feels too slow
to me.

I won't call this a benchmark, since that implies more accuracy in the
measurements than I tried to make, but here are the results of a simple
test I did with two machines, my laptop, and my desktop. The purpose of
this post is to see if anyone can point me towards the information I
need to learn how to improve the performance of the machines under Red
Hat 8.0, especially the desktop machine.

The test involved starting a terminal, starting Mozilla, and connecting
to http://jigzone.com. On right side of their home page, there are
several images which, when clicked, take you to a page with a java app
that turns that image into a jig saw puzzle. For the "benchmark" part of
the experiment, I typed "date" in the terminal, clicked on the 48 state
US map puzzle, waited for it to finish loading, and typed "date" on the
terminal again. Then I computed the difference in time between the
output of the two "date" commands.

I repeated the test on each machine running Windows 98SE and using the
time command in a DOS window. In each case, the installation of Win98 is
the one provided by the manufacturer of the machine. In the case of the
Red Hat installations, the one on the laptop is the default installation
from the Red Hat CD's, while the one on the desktop is the kernel I
compiled the other day specifying that I have an AMD K6-2 processor, and
leaving all the other options in their default condition.

The laptop is a Thinkpad 390X, with a 400 Mhz Celeron and 96 Mb of RAM.
The desktop is a special from Bi-Mart a couple of years ago called an
Avatar VBOX, and has a 550 Mhz K6-2 with 192 Mb of RAM. The numbers in
the table are the elapsed seconds between running the date, or time
commands.

		thinkpad	avatar
Red Hat 8.0	23		35

Win 98SE	13		11

I would expect the avatar, with the 550 Mhz K6-2, to run a little bit
faster than the thinkpad, with the 400 Mhz Celeron, and under Win 98SE
that is the case. I'm curious about why the results are 1) slower under
Red Hat 8.0, and 2) why the avatar is so much slower than the thinkpad
under Red Hat 8.0. Hopefully, I'll learn what options to tweak when I
next compile the kernel so I can get better performance out of the
avatar.

Any ideas?

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens
http://rsteff.home.attbi.com/




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