Benchmark Programs

Discuss software and how to tweak more performance out of your system.
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Jim
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Posts: 1745
Joined: Wed Jan 21, 2004 7:10 pm
Location: Toronto

Benchmark Programs

Post by Jim »

What do I want in a benchmark program? A number of things.

1) It has to give repeatable results, all else being equal. By that I mean, if nothing has been changed the test result should be the same; (with very minor variation allowed for disk fragmentation state.)

2) It has to be sensitive to minor changes. That is to say, if I do some diddley little tweak w/ WPCredit, (wherein most changes result in very small gains or losses in system speed), I want to know if this particular change that I am benching is a net plus or a net minus.

3) It has to reflect the overall spectrum of effects that a given change may make. That is to say some changes may result in mixed gains and losses. i.e. you may gain in memory speed for example while silmultaneously losing in some other area of performance. Well I want to know that; and how much the gains and losses are; so I can make well based decisions about which tweaks to use.

4) The faster it runs, the better; because WPCredit has an awful lot of changes you can make.

5) I do not wish to be swamped in technicalese. It is a language which makes me sleepy, so the simpler the better.

What I would consider very neat would be a program that has a bar graph showing maybe half a dozen key performance perameters. You open the program, It takes a measurement of those perameters, you do your tweak, and then rerun the measurement; and it gives you before and after numbers for all the perameters measured. Of course it would have to have a save function with a space to be filled in with a description of the before and after state. i.e. What got changed?

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