2CPU.com have thrown up a new article which looks at Hyper-Threading performance in Linux! Here's a snip.
The last time we got together, we took a brief look into the technology behind hyper-threading and performance with a variety of Windows benchmarks. At the end of that article I vowed to bring you the Linux side of the story at a later date. Well friends, that time has arrived. Since the last installment, my testbed has strengthened considerably with the addition of 2x 3.2GHz Xeons with 1MB of L3 cache and a 3.2E Pentium 4 'Prescott'. The latter has received an upgrade of hyper-threading technology and Intel was kind enough to let us take a look at the impact it may have on Linux performance.
Anyone who's ever set out to perform Linux benchmarks quickly realizes the difficulties involved in such an undertaking, not only with the availability of quality benchmarks (or lack thereof), but also in the way the test system(s) are configured. Most of the Linux benchmarks that I see on hardware review sites are simple things like kernel compiles or povray... maybe a game benchmark or two. Those certainly have merit, but I wanted to try to do things differently for this article. I wanted to get more involved with server-oriented benchmarks to really see what hyper-threading brings to that market. Don't get me wrong, we're still going to take a look at compiling performance and even media-encoding performance, but those won't be the most interesting results you'll see here today.
Linux 2.6 and Hyper-Threading
The last time we got together, we took a brief look into the technology behind hyper-threading and performance with a variety of Windows benchmarks. At the end of that article I vowed to bring you the Linux side of the story at a later date. Well friends, that time has arrived. Since the last installment, my testbed has strengthened considerably with the addition of 2x 3.2GHz Xeons with 1MB of L3 cache and a 3.2E Pentium 4 'Prescott'. The latter has received an upgrade of hyper-threading technology and Intel was kind enough to let us take a look at the impact it may have on Linux performance.
Anyone who's ever set out to perform Linux benchmarks quickly realizes the difficulties involved in such an undertaking, not only with the availability of quality benchmarks (or lack thereof), but also in the way the test system(s) are configured. Most of the Linux benchmarks that I see on hardware review sites are simple things like kernel compiles or povray... maybe a game benchmark or two. Those certainly have merit, but I wanted to try to do things differently for this article. I wanted to get more involved with server-oriented benchmarks to really see what hyper-threading brings to that market. Don't get me wrong, we're still going to take a look at compiling performance and even media-encoding performance, but those won't be the most interesting results you'll see here today.
Linux 2.6 and Hyper-Threading
