File I/O benchmarks for various kernel

I've been using dbench a lot lately for reality checks on various kernel mods, and out of interest I decided to run benchmarks with it on a few different kernel versions. I noticed a major difference between 2.2 and 2.4 kernels - 2.4 is running the benchmarks about 3 times faster than 2.2, and it seems to be getting faster with each step towards 2.4.0. On the other hand, 2.2 seems to be getting slower. Here are a few points on the curve.

Test machine: 64 meg, 500 Mhz K6, IDE, Ext2, Blocksize=4K
Test: dbench 48

  Kernel                 Throughput      Elapsed Time
  ------                 ----------      ------------
  2.2.16                 3.1 MB/sec      33 min 53 secs
  2.2.18                 2.8 MB/sec      38 min 10 secs
  2.2.19-pre3            2.7 MB/sec      39 min 44 secs
  2.4.0-test12           7.3 MB/sec      14 min 32 secs
  2.4.0-test13-pre4      9.5 MB/sec      11 min 06 secs

2.4.0-test13-pre5 10.8 MB/sec 9 min 48 secs

Dbench was written by Andrew Tridgell to measure disk performance under simulated samba network traffic load. The '48' means it's simulating the file access patterns of 48 network clients, all doing heavy io at the same time.

For anyone interested in checking these results on their own hardware, dbench is available at:

ftp://samba.org/pub/tridge/dbench/dbench-1.1.tar.gz

--
Daniel
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