DAT Test 4: Extracting a large number of small files from DAT (DDS1 vs. DDS3)

SGI Performance Comparisons

Extracting a large number of small files from DAT (DDS1 vs. DDS3)

Last Change: 08/May/2008

This test is the opposite of DAT TEST 3 and is executed in much the same way. The command used to time this test, which was executed in a raw xterm from within an empty directory in /var/tmp, was:

   timex tar x

Again, since /usr/share varies in size between systems, it's the transfer rates which are important here, ie. do not use the times shown in Table 25 to make system comparisons (they're included only for reference). I have not yet performed the DDS1 tests.

                        DDS1 Python      DDS1 Python     DDS3 Sony
                       25601-XXX2.75    28388-XXX5.AC     SDT9000
                        rate (time)      rate (time)    rate (time)

O2 R5200SC 300MHz 1MB:                   394 (6:05)
O2 R5000SC/200:                                          561 (2:45)
Indigo2 R4400SC/250:                                     638 (2:25)
Indy R4400SC/200:                                        379 (3:19)
Indy R4600PC/133:                                        258 (4:53)
Indy R4600PC/100:                                        282 (4:28)

      Table 25: DDS1 vs. DDS3 performance for
       extracting many small files from DAT.

Observations:

Performance is slower than for archiving numerous files; this is probably because of the extra overhead of creating the files on the disk.
When archiving many small files, Indigo2 R4400SC/250 is no faster than O2 R5000SC/200. But extracting many small files reveals Indigo2 R4400SC/250 to be 13% faster than O2 R5000SC/200; exactly why this should be is difficult to tell - perhaps it's because the Indigo2 had a higher-clocked CPU and larger L2, which might be more important to the processing than the R5000's newer design.