The Cost of SELinux, Audit, & Kernel Debugging

[phoronix]

Phoronix: The Cost of SELinux, Audit, & Kernel Debugging

When benchmarking development releases of Fedora in particular, they often end up being much slower than the final build and perform lower when compared against some of the other leading desktop distributions. As we have mentioned in previous articles, this is generally due to the debugging support enabled within the development builds of Fedora. To see just what the performance cost is, we have compared the Fedora 11 performance of the normal kernel against the kernel-debug package. Additionally, we also compared the performance when disabling SELinux and system auditing support.

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=14104

[frantaylor]

This is an EXCELLENT benchmark article!!!

I have always wondered about this.

It's unfortunate to see that the applications that suffer most from SELinux are the ones that need it the most. Of course they are also the ones that are making the most use of it.

[MùPùF]

I'm working on SELinux at work, and I had been wondering about the cost of SELinux quite a lot.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to do check it!

[loonyphoenix]

A truly great article. BTW, is it only me or do other people get a constant double-take with these "fewer are better" measurements, especially as they're thrown in with "bigger is better" randomly? I always go, wtf the debugging symbols improve speed??? And then, oh yeah, it's one of those fewer are better...

Why don't you do something like this:


I think this is much more obvious (though it needs a bit more work)

[hdas]

Great article!

[frantaylor]

A truly great article. BTW, is it only me or do other people get a constant double-take with these "fewer are better" measurements, especially as they're thrown in with "bigger is better" randomly? I always go, wtf the debugging symbols improve speed??? And then, oh yeah, it's one of those fewer are better...

Why don't you do something like this:


I think this is much more obvious (though it needs a bit more work)

Instead of turning the graph upside down, turn the equation upside down and report transactions/sec.

[[Knuckles]]

Excellent! Very informative benchmark. It's things like these that make you see the importance of phoronix and why you should subscribe to support them

[nanonyme]

Instead of turning the graph upside down, turn the equation upside down and report transactions/sec.

Or to be pedantic, average transactions per second.

[frantaylor]

Or to be pedantic, average transactions per second.

It would be nice to see the range of times, too. People who buy databases want to know the worst-case performance, not the average. There are graphs in Tufte's books that illustrate these things nicely.

[nanonyme]

It would be nice to see the range of times, too. People who buy databases want to know the worst-case performance, not the average. There are graphs in Tufte's books that illustrate these things nicely.

Ah, good point. Maybe display a statistics that has minimum, maximum, median and average of all scores?