performance of VAX/780/750 Pyramid & Sun (longish)

[Partha Dasgupta]

The following are some performance figures for a VAX780, a VAX750,
the new Pyramid and a SUN-1. They are not standardized benchmarks, but
do provide some comparisons....

The 780 has Berkeley 4.1, while all the others ran 4.2bsd.


1) C-CARD : A CPU intensive, recursive card arranging routine,
written in C.

2) P-CARD : The exact same program, written in Pascal.

3) GREP : The command "grep 11 /usr/dict/words". Has considerable CPU
and i/o activity.

4) SWAP : A tough one. Initializes a 1 Meg integer array twice. Uses
4 Meg bytes of core (2 Meg on SUN), and causes a lot of swapping, 
possibly thrashing. It favors the SUN, but the SUN has a slower swapping 
disk, and less core.

Part I: Low Load tests

This part was done at low load. I was the only person logged in. The
data shows the CPU time used by the user process and the system, and
the elapsed time. The elapsed time for VAX780 is omitted as there
were a lot of background stuff running.

1) C-CARD
			User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed time

VAX-780			 6.8s		   0.1s		   --
VAX-750			13.3s		   0.1s		   14s
SUN			13.9s		   0.1s		   14s
Pyramid			 3.4s		   0.1s		    4s

2) P-CARD

			User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed time
VAX780			  23.3s	  	  1.0s		   --
VAX750			  32.5s		  0.4s		   33s
SUN			  41.0s		  0.4s		   42s
Pyramid		           3.4s		  0.1s		    4s

3) GREP

			User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed time
VAX780			  3.4s		  0.8s		   --
VAX750			  6.8s		  0.9s		    8s
SUN			  6.8s  	  0.9s		    8s
Pyramid			  3.3s		  0.5s		    4s

4) SWAP! (Note the dramatic rise in system CPU times. Caused by
swapping too much?)

			User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed time
VAX780			  13.6s		  11.5s		   ---
VAX750			  22.7s		  23.1s		   1:30s
SUN			  33.1s		 158.0s		   5:56s
Pyramid			   5.4s		   5.9s		   0:58s

Part II : High load testing.

This was done by loading the system by up to 20 processes of the same
command. 1) to 3) was run as 20 simultaneous processes. Naturally
load average reached nearly 20. The figures are averages, per process.

The SWAP! program could not be handled in large numbers. The Pyramid
allowed 6 processes before saying "No more core". The 780, 750 and SUN
gave up after 3 processes. The figures are for 5 processes on Pyramid
and 3 on 780/750/SUN.


1) C-CARD (20 processes)
			User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed time
VAX780			   6.8s		  0.2s		   2:15s
VAX750			  13.4s		  0.4s		   4:37s
SUN			  16.0s		  0.6s		   5:28s
Pyramid			   3.4s		  0.1s		   1:04s

2)P-CARD (20 processes)
			User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed time
VAX780				(no data)
VAX750			   33.5s	   0.6s		   11:10s
SUN			   47.8s	   3.9		   16:00s
Pyramid		  	    3.4s	   0.1s		    1:06s (!!)	

3) GREP (20 processes)
			User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed time
VAX780			   3.5s		  0.9s		   1:20s
VAX750			   7.0s		  0.8s		   2:45s
SUN			   7.5s		  1.4s		   2:50s
Pyramid			   4.0s		  0.5s		   1:20s

4) SWAP! : This program brought all the systems to their knees. They
probably thrashed badly. Even echoing characters on the terminal
seemed to be a problem! The sun especially has a small slow swapping
disk and was the hardest hit.
			User-CPU	System-CPU	Elapsed time
VAX780 (3 processes)	 14.0s		  14.0s		   3:40s
VAX750 (3 processes)     23.5s		  23.1s		   4:26s
SUN    (3 processes)     35.6s		 104.0s		  13:00s
Pyramid (3 processes)	  5.9s(!)	   6.0s		   2:30s
Pyramid (5 processes)	  5.9s  	   6.0s		   4:17s

Thus the Pyramid-90 seems to be a winner. However the tiny SUN's
performance was astounding. It matched the 750 all the time, except
for the SWAP program, but then its disk is mainly to blame. Makes one
wonder whether a 750 is really worth it, when a el-cheapo M68000 can
get this sort of performance. 

(There has been a lot of mud slinging at the Sun on the net. I agree
its not very impressive when run on its bitmap screen in single user
mode, but on the ethernet, with a couple of users logged in it really
looks as good (or bad?) as a 750. Wonder if you would notice it if
someone yanked out your 750, and put in a Sun....)

Partha Dasgupta
SUNY Stony Brook
...allegra!sbcs!partha