Hi.
During the testing of the OKP module for UnixWare 7.1.3 I found out
something I'd like to share with the group.
I'm in the process of writing a large article which will be (hopefully)
published on Tony Lawrences' site but I'd like some comments about the
following issue before actually publishing it.
For those of you unaware of it, OKP is a module which allows the
execution os unmodified OS5 binaries on UnixWare 7; the LITE version is
freely downloadable from SCO's site whereas the FULL version (which
comes with a 5.0.7 media kit) comes with a small fee.
I selected a given box (PIII-700, 256MB, Adaptec 39160 SCSI controller,
1 8GB SCSI disk) for my tests; the above HD was divided into 2
partitions. The first one got installed with SCO OS 5.0.7 + MP1 and the
second one was a UnixWare 7.1.3 + MP3.
I installed Informix OnLine 7.31 for SCO OS5 on the first one, tuned
some kernel parameters as suggested by Informix and performed some
tests, such as the "dbimport" of a previously exported dbase, the
"update statistics high" on the root dbspace and a "select" on a couple
of non-indexed tables.
The above parameters were mainly related to the SHARED MEMORY, an IPC
mechanism highly used by Informix during its operations.
On UW 7.1.3, I installed OKP and "imported" the OS 5.0.7 filesystem from
another box (running the same OS & Informix version), set up the same
Informix environment, I did __NOT__ tune the UW7 kernel as suggested
(since UW7 kernel has some auto-tuning parameters which does not require
it) and performed the very same tests as above.
Mind you that, after every test, I rebooted the box as to avoid a
possible performance boost due to the disk caching system and that every
test was repeated several times and measured with "time".
I had some soft of mixed results.
The "dbimport" procedure (a procedure which performs a lot of write
operations) was faster on the "real" OS5 (9m41s vs 10m44s) but the
"update statistics high" (mainly read ops) was faster under OKP (1m06s
vs 1m38s).
The "select" procedure (again, a read op) saw OKP literally
outperforming OS5, with a time of 1m21s against 4m47s.
I performed some other non Informix related tests such as "openssl
speed" (OS5 outperformed - in some case - OKP by a factor of 2-3%) and a
"tar xvf" of a 80MB file, which again showed that OS5 was faster (20s vs
1m04s).
Keeping in mind that I did __NOT__ tune both kernels as to provide
optimized filesystem performances, I was wondering if UnixWare7/OKP (out
of the box) can indeed be faster than OS5 while __READING__ and slower
while __WRITING__.
I know that I might tune both kernels to achieve a speed enhancement but
I'd like to know the opinion of the group before proceeding with further
tests.
--
Best,
Roberto
--
Roberto Zini - Technical Support Manager - email:r.zini<AT>strhold.it
Technical Support Manager -- Strhold Evolution Division R.E. (ITALY)
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