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Date:      Fri, 6 Dec 2002 00:16:02 -0500 (EST)
From:      Mikhail Teterin <mi@corbulon.video-collage.com>
To:        sparc@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   why would Sparc be soo sloow?
Message-ID:  <200212060516.gB65G3qK047316@corbulon.video-collage.com>

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Hello!

This is only marginally FreeBSD related... Sorry...

I'm puzzled by the poor performance of our SparcIII @900MHz.

On our particular, heavily number crunching little application, the best
(using Sun's own compiler with -xarch=v9b -xO5, etc.) it can show off is
being about 7.5 times slower than my desktop Pentium4 @2GHz.

The Sparc machine is running a recent Solaris (the box purchased about 9
months ago). My desktop runs FreeBSD-current.

First observed with pvm, the slowness was confirmed by a simple
standalone application, that read the input (through scanf()) one line
at a time from the text file.

The SpecBench score of this machine (Sunfire 280) is about 20-30%
lower than that of mine (Dell Dimension)... I'd accept the factor of
3 or 4, but 7.5 is casting doubts over my measurements, yet the
results are quite repeatable...

Another mistery is a high "system" component of the time (builtin(1))
output -- on Solaris over half the time is spent in "kernel". Can it
be trusted? On FreeBSD, very little is spent in kernel -- as expected.

(FWIW, the older Pentium2 @450MHz is only 2.5 times slower than the
P4 @2GHz. Still over 3 times faster than the SparcIII)

Any hints? Thanks!

	-mi

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