A Number Of New & Updated Linux Benchmarks

[phoronix]

Phoronix: A Number Of New & Updated Linux Benchmarks

After yesterday writing about recent benchmarking improvements, including over a dozen new open-source benchmarks graciously provided by Intel and then ongoing improvements to the Phoronix Test Suite client, there's more to talk about this morning for those interested in open-source benchmarking...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI4MjU

[coder111]

As a software developer, I'd like to see benchmarked on Linux with various configurations:

1. Performance for different programming languages. Java, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP on different kernels/CPUs.
2. Performance for databases- PostgreSQL, mysql, sqlite, maybe some no-SQL stuff (Cassandra? MongoDB?), maybe some commercial ones like Oracle/Sybase (oh, I think EULA says you cannot publish their benchmarks. That's too bad. In my opinion most of them suck anyway).
3. Performance for application servers- various implementations of J2EE- Tomcat, Jboss, Glassfish, messaging- ActiveMQ, HornetQ, any other major implementations. Test Python/PHP application servers/frameworks.
4. Performance for development tools. Build times with maven/ant, C/C++ make, some benchmarks for IDEs like Eclipse/Netbeans/whatever people are using for C++ or other languages these days.

I know that's a lot to ask for, but as a developer doing Serious Stuff, these would be much more interesting to me than FPS in some game or performance of Jack the ripper. And other technical readers of your website would probably be more interested in those as well.

--Coder

[Calinou]

I know that's a lot to ask for, but as a developer doing Serious Stuff, these would be much more interesting to me than FPS in some game or performance of Jack the ripper. And other technical readers of your website would probably be more interested in those as well.

Yeah, games are totally pointless... I forgot why we are living in the first place.

We have enough benchmarks for various programming languages, I think there are PHP tests already.

[Michael]

As a software developer, I'd like to see benchmarked on Linux with various configurations:

1. Performance for different programming languages. Java, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP on different kernels/CPUs.
2. Performance for databases- PostgreSQL, mysql, sqlite, maybe some no-SQL stuff (Cassandra? MongoDB?), maybe some commercial ones like Oracle/Sybase (oh, I think EULA says you cannot publish their benchmarks. That's too bad. In my opinion most of them suck anyway).
3. Performance for application servers- various implementations of J2EE- Tomcat, Jboss, Glassfish, messaging- ActiveMQ, HornetQ, any other major implementations. Test Python/PHP application servers/frameworks.
4. Performance for development tools. Build times with maven/ant, C/C++ make, some benchmarks for IDEs like Eclipse/Netbeans/whatever people are using for C++ or other languages these days.

I know that's a lot to ask for, but as a developer doing Serious Stuff, these would be much more interesting to me than FPS in some game or performance of Jack the ripper. And other technical readers of your website would probably be more interested in those as well.

--Coder

The Phoronix Test Suite is open-source software and patches are happily accepted. So as a software developer, feel free to submit some test profiles (or even simple test scripts to showcase the automatic running of such benchmarks you'd like to see) for upstream and then you'd see them benchmarked on Phoronix.com. Sponsoring of new tests is also welcome.

[Veerappan]

As a software developer, I'd like to see benchmarked on Linux with various configurations:

1. Performance for different programming languages. Java, Perl, Ruby, Python, PHP on different kernels/CPUs.

This only covers the first point of your post, but check out:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/

Benchmarks of various algorithms as implemented by coders in various languages. It can give you a rough impression of the performance of the run-time/compiler for various languages.

[coder111]

This only covers the first point of your post, but check out:
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/

Cool site. Now if that was per CPU (Intel, AMD, various ARMs) and per different OS, that would be really interesting. Right now all they have are quad xeons. People need to see that more often- maybe then the misconception that Java is slow will finally die...

Michael, I'm sorry if I sounded bitchy and whiny, I really didn't mean to. These are just humble suggestions/ideas on how to improve phoronix test suite. Unfortunatelly I don't have time to do that myself, not at the moment... Thanks for your effort- Phoronix is a nice site, and has quite a lot of interesting Linux related tech news, probably more than any other site on the net that I know of. If you are ever in London, drop me an email and I'll buy you a beer, that's least I can do

And computer games, yes, they are nice and fun and I love them, but this is not what I deal with on a day-to-day basis.

--Coder

[Luke_Wolf]

Cool site. Now if that was per CPU (Intel, AMD, various ARMs) and per different OS, that would be really interesting. Right now all they have are quad xeons. People need to see that more often- maybe then the misconception that Java is slow will finally die...

Michael, I'm sorry if I sounded bitchy and whiny, I really didn't mean to. These are just humble suggestions/ideas on how to improve phoronix test suite. Unfortunatelly I don't have time to do that myself, not at the moment... Thanks for your effort- Phoronix is a nice site, and has quite a lot of interesting Linux related tech news, probably more than any other site on the net that I know of. If you are ever in London, drop me an email and I'll buy you a beer, that's least I can do

And computer games, yes, they are nice and fun and I love them, but this is not what I deal with on a day-to-day basis.

--Coder

Eh... To be honest I'd rather them not find out, because I really hate writing in it, as do most of the people I've talked to. Now personally I'm a fan of C++ and Qt, and I can't stand Java at all. The reason for this basically comes down to a philosophical difference between KDE/C++ and Gnome/Java.

C++ says "Welcome to the house, here's the T-Shirt and feel free to do whatever you want even if it means breaking stuff, I'll do my best to try to prevent breakages from happening but you want to do it go right ahead, I'll even let you completely remodel the place"

while Java says "You will do what I say, when I say it, how I say to do it. You don't get to do anything else, now go sit in that corner and stab yourself in the hand for 5 minutes because I the language designer said so"

Now personally that attitude right there is exactly why I left Gnome during the 2.X series maybe a year or two after my being introduced to Linux, as I was started off by the person who introduced me with Ubuntu. Of course here's the thing... Ubuntu has this chronic problem of being absolutely fugly, this drove me towards theming it to remove the ugly. Problem was Gnome decided they'd pull the theming tools out from under me, yeah that didn't go over so well, and so a friend recommended I try KDE and I liked it because I could do whatever it was I wanted, eventually I left Ubuntu due to their brokenness and went to Fedora at the same friend's suggestion but that's another story.

Point is I for one can't stand the megalomaniacal control freak attitude of the Java language designers and neither can the other people I've talked to, which does things like increase the attrition rate of CompSci majors at the Universities that Sun Microsystems bribed. Hell even Python allows for overloading operators but the Java language designers are convinced that they'll be "abused".

Now I have looked at C# on the other paw and it seems to have a philosophy of "Here's the house rules, follow them and we'll all be doing okay" which I can actually work with, and also has various features that can actually make it in some regards an improvement over C++ namely stuff like properties at the language level. So there's some argument for supporting that... Java though.... just please no.

[coder111]

Eh... To be honest I'd rather them not find out, because I really hate writing in it, as do most of the people I've talked to. Now personally I'm a fan of C++ and Qt, and I can't stand Java at all. The reason for this basically comes down to a philosophical difference between KDE/C++ and Gnome/Java.

C++ says "Welcome to the house, here's the T-Shirt and feel free to do whatever you want even if it means breaking stuff, I'll do my best to try to prevent breakages from happening but you want to do it go right ahead, I'll even let you completely remodel the place"

Personally, as it comes to enjoyment of the development process itself, I am inclined to agree. However, add clueless management and newbie to mediocre coworkers into the mix, and things start to change. When you cannot trust your teammates to do the right thing, having less ways to shoot yourself in the foot is very useful. Of course it's possible to scew up completely in Java, but it's a little bit easier to do that in C++. Well, of course it's easier to do something smart and clever in C++. However, these days I try not to do anything smart & clever, and try my best to keep things simple stupid. Oh, and you cannot just "fire the bad developers and get better ones"- management is clueless a lot of the time as well.

And I kinda felt that you used Java to develop desktop/clientside apps. Doing desktop stuff with Java is OK these days, but serverside enterprise stuff is where Java really shines. Add all the useful frameworks and open-source libraries, and it's the language with easily the best support out there. I haven't seen that many server-side apps written in C++.

Anyway, keep coding and ejoy it
--Coder

[Luke_Wolf]

Personally, as it comes to enjoyment of the development process itself, I am inclined to agree. However, add clueless management and newbie to mediocre coworkers into the mix, and things start to change. When you cannot trust your teammates to do the right thing, having less ways to shoot yourself in the foot is very useful. Of course it's possible to scew up completely in Java, but it's a little bit easier to do that in C++. Well, of course it's easier to do something smart and clever in C++. However, these days I try not to do anything smart & clever, and try my best to keep things simple stupid. Oh, and you cannot just "fire the bad developers and get better ones"- management is clueless a lot of the time as well.

Well yes, It's possible to screw up badly in any language, but that wasn't the point I was really getting at. Basically it's all about the attitude of the language, Python for instance is basically *the* "I will make you program correctly" language as a mathematicians response to perl, and yet I can actually deal with it because it doesn't have the megalomaniacal bent to it, I don't particularly care for some of it's eccentricities (dynamic typing even when strongly typed just isn't my cup of tea, among other issues) but I can deal with it as a language, Java though I simply cannot.

But here's personally where I see C# come in you can shoot yourself in the foot less with it than C++, but it's actually pleasant to work with, you get all those same managed language features as Java but without the control freaks developing it and it shows. Only real problem with it is that GUI stuff on mono is in kind of a messed up situation. I'm still in the evaluation stage though but I'm going to try it out by writing a modular IRC bot for a friend since he had been complaining about such things. Which basically seemed to boil down to because it's considered so trivial, people don't tend to put much consideration for design into it, so it sounded like a fun personal project for me to do and good for me to be able to test out some language features that interest me like loading assemblies (which I plan to use as scripts).

And I kinda felt that you used Java to develop desktop/clientside apps. Doing desktop stuff with Java is OK these days, but serverside enterprise stuff is where Java really shines. Add all the useful frameworks and open-source libraries, and it's the language with easily the best support out there. I haven't seen that many server-side apps written in C++.

Anyway, keep coding and ejoy it
--Coder

Yeah all I've done is client side stuff with it, that said I'm curious: Is there something these frameworks you mention support that Qt doesn't?

[curaga]

while Java says "You will do what I say, when I say it, how I say to do it. You don't get to do anything else, now go sit in that corner and stab yourself in the hand for 5 minutes because I the language designer said so"

...

Point is I for one can't stand the megalomaniacal control freak attitude of the Java language designers and neither can the other people I've talked to, which does things like increase the attrition rate of CompSci majors at the Universities that Sun Microsystems bribed. Hell even Python allows for overloading operators but the Java language designers are convinced that they'll be "abused".

You just wrote exactly why I hate Go. All those downsides that apply to Java apply just as much to Go, even the over-verbosity and no way to go around it.