Leonard den Ottolander leonard@den.ottolander.nl wrote:
Because I benchmarked an actual task that my readers are likely to perform?
No, because if you benchmark a file system you shouldn't benchmark a CPU intensive task like compiling a kernel as file system performance will only have a relatively small impact on the compilation time (signal/noise).
A change from 1400 seconds (ext3) to 1583 (reiser4) strikes me as more than noise. If I run reiser4 on that particular system, I have to wait three more minutes to get my kernel built. (Yes, it drops to 1445 seconds if you happen to have a kernel tarball built in the reiser4-optimum order, but that is worth noting too).
Reiser4 is a CPU-heavy filesystem - by admission of its own developers. So its performance will certainly suffer, relative to lighter filesystems, when executing a CPU-intensive, filesystem-intensive task. Running benchmarks which do not load the processor can be useful for generating those "guaranteed not to exceed" numbers, but they mask the extra cost involved in using a filesystem which requires a lot of processor time to operate.
If I wanted to print best-case-scenario benchmarks, I could have simply copied them from Namesys.com. I think there is also a place for "real world" tests.
jon