> If you're really concerned, you could delete the SelfTest*Passed Lines in
> local.ini before starting under the other system, to make it rerun the
> test under that as well.
And you should probably re-run the self test if you change the
system hardware in any way (especially motherboard, processor or
memory modules), or upgrade the operating system in a way that
affects the kernel module(s) loaded.
>
> > 3. How does the efficiency of mprime compare to Prime95? (That is, I'm
> > getting 0.207 s/iteration under Prime95 right now. How would mprime handle
> > a comparable number?)
> There is a little difference, but I think it's mainly because you tend to
> have more services running under Linux, it's within 5%
This is a really tricky, contentious area. Actually I think the answer
is that there's no significant difference between the raw
performance of the various operating systems. If anything both Win
NT and Linux are both a bit more efficient than Win9x, on an
otherwise idle system with adequate memory resources. (Note that
NT needs more memory than 9x needs more memory than Linux,
to cope with the same application load)
So much depends on what optional services you're running, and
the order things get loaded in, that people are bound to get
conflicting results for this type of comparison. In fact I find the
performance of Prime95/Win 95 can & does vary from boot to boot
by up to 2%, even if nothing appears to have changed at all since
the provious boot.
On Win 9x and NT, you seem to get the best performance by
loading the system right up so that the memory is exhausted, then
starting Prime95, then stopping the unneccessary tasks. I think
this forces the system to load the important bits of Prime95 into
contiguous physical memory, thereby improving the performance of
the cache. The performance improvement is around 2% e.g.
iteration benchmark for 320K FFT (exponent ~6M) on my PII-333
improves from 0.251/0.252 to 0.246/0.247 as a consequence of
loading this way. (I wrote a dedicated swap thrashing program to
load the system up). I find you usually need to reload Prime95
when starting a new assignment in order to keep the performance
as high as possible.
Regards
Brian Beesley
