Open Source OS Benchmarking Competition

BenchmarkingFreak writes "OSnews is running a story about a new benchmarking competition: OSU Open Source Lab wanted to take the concept of benchmarking a little bit further with the Beaver Challenge 2004. In this competition they will be allowing a community of experts in each OS to tweak their configurations to ensure maximum performance. And they are running it all on wicked machines, just imagine... well you know."

Comments

Missing One?

[elid]

We have selected the following distributions. This list is not final and if people want to ante in to try this with their favorite distro, let us know at bc2004 at osuosl dot org or in #beaverchallenge on the Freenode.net IRC network.

* Debian GNU/Linux
* Fedora Linux
* FreeBSD
* Gentoo Linux
* NetBSD
* OpenBSD
* Red Hat Linux
* Slackware Linux
* SuSE GNU/Linux

Where's Mandrake?

Sex on the brain

[Jason Earl]

First a story about screws, now a story about beavers. Apparently the /. crew had a slow weekend.

What wil they be benchmarking?

[MysteriousMystery]

Will they be benchmarking database performance, GCC compiling speed, I took at look at the methodology page and it wasn't particularly specific.

Why not include Windows and perhaps others?

[enosys]

Why not include Windows and perhaps others? I guess they wouldn't include non-open-source ones because it's a site about open source but I'd love to see the comparison. Have any other sites done that?

Linux Junkie:

[iammaxus]

This is clearly a plot by Microsoft and SCO to destroy OSS! They couldn't beat any one of us, but if they get us to fight each other...

Recycle Bin Performance?

[Gothmolly]

"In this competition they will be allowing a community of experts in each OS to tweak their configurations to ensure maximum performance."

I can see it now, teams of KDE and GNOME developers going head to head to see who can come up with the best color scheme, antialiased fonts, and 'Are you sure you want to delete this?' dialog box. Followed by Round 2, where each group has to compile something built for the other camp's desktop, whoever can fight through the dependencies quicker wins!

Lord Linus, save us from OSNews.

Hyper Threading

[SunBug]

Will they let you tweak Hyper Threading?

It'll be interesting to see how many people turn Hyper Threading OFF when doing some tests. I found that my database was 212% FASTER for read operations after I turned Hyper Threading off on the 2650.

Re:A Cool Idea, But...

[acidtripp101]

Advice: Read the HUNDREDS of posts on the gentoo forums about this.

The fact of the matter is that portage is plenty fast. Any speed boosts given to the actual emerge program set would be negligable because of the sheer amount of time dedicated to compiling.

More Advice: Stop trolling.

When you say that "Portage was a good idea, and is a HORRIBLE implementation" you really need to enumerate WHY it's a horrible implementation.
Take this common troll as an example.
Example 1: Windows is a HORRIBLE OS.
Example 2: Windows is a HORRIBLE OS because being locked into the choices Microsoft made in my "interests" are usually counter-productive.

See the difference? Example 1, while in many people's oppinion is valid, leaves people wondering why Windows is horrible. Example 2 gives anybody reading specific evidence and also allows anybody that wants to defend the point areas to do so.

I love the way that gentoo handles packages. I, admitingly, have a BSD bias, but it still allows my system to be what I want.
The feature set is anything but 'insane,' but once again, I have no idea why you think so, so I can't exactly defend that against any reasons you have.

Reply to this post and we might actually have some decent points to give to the gentoo team to make inprovements.