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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.netspace.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!news.idt.net!enews.sgi.com!fido.asd.sgi.com!neteng!lm From: lm@neteng.engr.sgi.com (Larry McVoy) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc Subject: Re: no such thing as a "general user community" Followup-To: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.sys.sgi.misc Date: 1 Apr 1997 01:50:32 GMT Organization: Silicon Graphics Inc., Mountain View, CA Lines: 53 Message-ID: <5hppl8$9t2@fido.asd.sgi.com> References: <331BB7DD.28EC@net5.net> <5hn00k$dio@fido.asd.sgi.com> <5hnam9$393@hoopoe.psc.edu> <5hp7p3$1qb@fido.asd.sgi.com> <5hpkr6$32u@hoopoe.psc.edu> Reply-To: lm@slovax.engr.sgi.com NNTP-Posting-Host: neteng.engr.sgi.com X-Newsreader: TIN [version 1.2 PL2] Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:38215 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:6534 comp.sys.sgi.misc:29580 Peter Berger (peterb@hoopoe.psc.edu) wrote: : YOUR RESEARCH METHODOLOGY WAS UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY BOGUS. That's nice. $5 says you didn't read the paper. $10 says you haven't read any of the papers that reference lmbench. : is presenting results to me, I can know that their methodology : was rigorous. Let's see. I gathered results from a bunch of systems, carefully documented what the systems were, wrote it up, presented it, got best paper, went home. Since then, noone has come forward with any suggestion that the data was incorrect, that the benchmarks were incorrect, or that paper was incorrect. So what, exactly, is your frigging problem? : Larry, the fact that your assumptions turned out to be : close to reality doesn't really matter. That's the best you can do? That's so weak. Let's see, you accuse me of skewing the data, when that turns out to be false, you accuse me of using wildly differing hardware, when that turns out to be false, you say it doesn't matter. I say it does matter. I didn't bother measuring FreeBSD and Linux on the same hardware because I really didn't care about FreeBSD vs Linux. I did include P5@120mhz Linux numbers to have a reasonable comparison to the P5@133 FreeBSD numbers, but that was for FreeBSD's benefit, so they could see where to do more work. The paper, in case you didn't notice, measured intel, sparc, alpha, rios, parisc, etc. It's hardly an apples to apples comparison, nor was it intended to be. You're all upset and whining because that's what you wanted. Well, if you want a comparison of all the free operating systems on the exact same hardware, be my guest. Go do it. I wanted a reasonable idea of how fast a bunch of different platforms could do a bunch of different things that I, in my own opinion, consider to be useful things to know. I think that is what other people wanted as well and I think that's why the paper got picked as best of conference. Simply because it's a bunch of useful information. : I'm concerned when someone stands up in front of a group of his peers : and pretends to be able to draw conclusions from hallucinatory : research. I believe that conclusions that I drew were: memory & cache systems are the most important thing. In fact, that's exactly what the paper said and exactly what I said at the conference. Go look. And it is exactly what Aaron and Margo "discovered" after working with a modified verion of lmbench on a bunch of different platforms. So I'd be really interested to know, buddy boy, exactly what conclusions you are attributing to me that you consider "hallucinatory".