Re: [lc-devel] Next items to be done

[Rodrigo S. de C. <rc...@im...>]

On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 10:37:54AM -0500, Dilma DaSilva wrote:
> Your TODO list makes sense. It mentions twice experiments and
> statistics for "workloads". I'm very curious to know which type of
> workload you're planning. I think it's useful to think about this even 
> before going much further with develpment. 

You are right, I think it's very sensible to think about that at this
moment. Most the tests done so far are from memtest suite, which are
not the "best" tests in my opinion (Rik van Riel stated that once on
an irc channel). But I think the main tests from this suite (fillmem
and mmap001) can still be part of the tests we can run to "fell" how
well the cache is going on.

Other tests that I had in mind are the ones used in Swap Compression
paper [1]. Their tests are: fft (fast Fourier transmation), sort,
simulator (simulator of a network of disks from theirs research group)
and xanim. that can replaced by something newer like mplayer to play
dvix, which makes intensive use of CPU and memory. I also think that
the chess program (sjeng) written by Gian-Carlo Pascutto can be a good
option.

The sort test (in randomized inputs) has showed a slowdown in Fred
Douglis' implementation [2]. Another tests that had horrible
performance in Douglis' compressed cache were applications based on
index engine for Gold Mailer (he aimed to show how well main-memory
database could benefit from the compression). His tests were to create
an index and to perform queries. The slowdown was between 20 to 40% in
these cases. Therefore I think we have to test a database application
(maybe even this application Douglis used) and the randomized sort.

To conclude, maybe a complex stuff like linux kernel compilation can
be nice to run and some sort of benchmark kit (lmbench?). 

Comments are welcome.

[1] R. Cerver, T. Cortes, Y. Becerra. Improving Application
Performance through Swap Compression. Universitat Politècnica de
Catalunya - Barcelona. 1999.

[2] Fred Douglis. The Compression Cache: Using On-Line Compression to
Extend Physical Memory. Matsushita Information Technology
Laboratory. 1993.

Regards,
-- 
Rodrigo S. de Castro <rc...@im...>