Personally, I think the most interesting will be some parallel benchmarks and benchmarks like Apache, PostgreSQL, Sqlite not interesting at all (at least using Ext4 file system).
Reply With QuoteWell, I could take it that if I install one of these OSs on my hardware without performing any tweaking, I should expect Windows 7 to run pretty well comparatively. Sure I guess I could tweak Linux (minorly or heavily), or I have to install other stuff on Windows which will slow it down, or my particular hardware/driver setup will affect results...Originally Posted by susikala
But mostly I don't care, nor do most users. Sure different setups might produce different results, but this is a great start... and probably reasonably representative of the state of the world. It's a great place to have that dialog about how well Linux performs in the real world (on the desktop), and what the factors are.
If people go away from this to explore and tweak their little part of Linux (and contribute it back), things will get better. If this switches the dialog away from 'Linux is unquestionably awesome don't ever mention/compare/suggest a feature found in Windows' into a rational discussion of what end users experience (those who have no interest in tweaking their machine). If this starts to establish benchmarks or ways to have rational comparisons between OSes.... it's a good thing.
At the very least, it shows how Michael has expanded his fabulous test suite into a cross platform tool --- which is incredibly invaluable. Now we have another tool to test the performance of open source software across multiple platforms - how is that not a good thing.
So if anything is a waste here, it's the attitude that there is nothing of value -- be open to what value it does bring an we can build on that. This is just a start - being so critical is not helpful.
If the server must guarantee data will be immediately written to the disc and on the desktop there won't be so strict mode used, desktop OS will get better results thanks to caching. The same if you do some benchmarks in virtual machine - it can give far better results then a physical host, but those results will be meaningless. When comes to server benchmarks I wouldn't test the default OS's settings. Some applications like Firefox uses SQLite and Amarok uses MySQL for default. I'd like to see some encoding, decoding, unpacking, compressing, computation benchmarks. Speed of creating, deleting, copying files, directories. This is what's important on desktops IMHO.
