July 26, 2008 at 10:33 pm · Filed under Linux
Phoronix Test Suite makes it just too easy to run benchmarks. I decided to run some benchmarks on Tombraider (my Linux server) and the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) setup I have.
Tombraider is an AMD Athlon 4200+ with 2GB DDR2-667 RAM. Lots of things are running in the background all the time, which were not cancelled for these tests, so don’t treat them as hugely accurate. The KVM was created using ubuntu-vm-builder and uses the special JeOS kernek. It was freshly created for the benchmarks so was not running anything else.
I ran the entire suite of command line benchmarks, unfortunately some failed to run for whatever reasons (missing packages on the KVM, and some also failed to run on Tombraider – no idea why), however it still provides a wide range of results. because there are so many graphs, I have decided to upload the XML file containing the results where you can view all of the graphs and figures, and get more details about the software setup. As I say, they are not highly accurate so don’t take them too seriously.
The results are impressive. All of the encoding tests were very close indeed, which is nice to know because I use a Windows 2000 KVM for encoding my TV shows. However the KVM was let down in the compiling tests and compression tests. Composite tests and RAM tests were also very good. Its important to remember that the KVM had only 512MB of RAM available to it, whereas Tombraider had whatever was spare (probably around 1GB), which I expect would have an effect on the compression tests at least.
I’m hoping to add some VMware Server benchmarks alongside these results sometime in the near future. I recently migrated from VMware Server to a KVM setup, so I hope to see KVM outperforming VMware Server (though there were other reasons for migrating too e.g. clock drift).