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From: g89r4222@kudu.ru.ac.za (Geoff Rehmet)
Subject: Re: NetBSD TCP/IP network benchmarks
Message-ID: <g89r4222.750411858@kudu>
Sender: news@hippo.ru.ac.za (Usenet News Admin)
Organization: Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa
References: <CEnnD9.H8w@agora.rain.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1993 07:44:18 GMT
Lines: 78

In <CEnnD9.H8w@agora.rain.com> davidg@agora.rain.com (David Greenman) writes:

>>UDP round trip latency (in milliseconds)
>>
>>system			message size (bytes)
>>			1	100	512	1024	1472
>>-------------------------------------------------------------
>>NetBSD 0.8		2.63	3.49	6.04	 9.54	12.50
>>Mach 2.5		1.83	2.44	5.19	 8.51	11.41
>>Mach 3.0(UX)		3.96	4.67	7.86	11.65	15.00
>>Mach 3.0(BSDSS)	4.64	5.37	8.95	13.23	16.84
>>Mach 3.0(library)	2.12 	2.68	5.41	 8.74	11.66

>   I just grabbed your latency benchmark program. Here is the
>result (again: client=486DX2/66 w/8013, server=486DX/33 w/8013):

>FreeBSD-1.0E		1.0011	1.356	2.7415	4.4723	5.9395


>...and I just read your message about your board being an 8bit 3c503.
>First, I'm sure you agree that the 1 byte ping test above isn't going
>to be effected be the type of card that is being used, and in this case
>the software is identical (the 'ed' driver supports the 80x3, 8/16bit
>3c503, NE1000 and NE2000).
>   Now, let me say that attempting to test network performance by using
>an 8bit ethernet card is rediculous. You're testing the speed that you
>can write the shared memory on the board - not the networking code. A
>test with the client/server being localhost would be more telling:

I was running some tests of the Linda system which I am currently
developing last night.  The tests showed a quite significant
difference in the amount of throughput for machines using 16bit
ethernet cards (as opposed to 8bit).
Roughly speaking, for the same amount of CPU time used, the
machines with 16bit cards processed about double the number of
evals than the machines with 8 bit cards did.
(The program being run was an n-queens program, with board sizes
varying from 12 to 15.  The tuple space server was running on a
Sun10/52.)
The FreeBSD systems being used are 486DX33's with 8/16M RAM, and
either WD8003E 8 bit or SMC Elite 16 bit cards.  Other systems
being used during the runs were various Sun workstations.
If anyone is interested I can send them some of my performance
results - they aren't really all that interesting.

Here is the breakdown of the performance of the FreeBSD Systems:
Notice that the machines with 16bit cards process about double
the number of evals per second.  The example given here is for a
15x15 chess board, with workers being spawned at a depth of 4.
The real time taken for the test was 618 seconds.

Machine            CPU sec  Evals Evals/sec NIC     RAM 
-------            -------  ----- --------- ----    ---
braae.ru.ac.za     569.29   630   1.1066    16bit   16M
csmsc1.ru.ac.za    515.25   563   1.0926    16bit   16M
csrbh08.ru.ac.za   593.01   309   0.5210     8bit    8M
csrbg02.ru.ac.za   592.10   306   0.5168     8bit    8M
csbodo2.ru.ac.za   593.02   306   0.5160     8bit    8M
csds.ru.ac.za      570.42   639   1.1202    16bit    8M

(just for fun ...)
omega.ru.ac.za     952.13  3733   3.9206 Sun10/52

All the 486's are running FreeBSD 1.0EPSILON.

I know this is not a direct benchmark of network performance, but
it does illustrate very graphically the difference between using
8 and 16bit ethernet cards.  (Oh also - the tests were run
between 12pm and 1am - giving a low overall network load).


Geoff.

--
===========================csgr@alpha.ru.ac.za================================
 Geoff Rehmet, Parallel Processing Group, |  ____   _ o         /\
 Computer Science Department,             | ___  _-\_<,        /\/\/\
 Rhodes University, RSA.                  |     (*)/'(*)    /\/\/\/\/\