Aucbarpa.1208 net.works utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!ARPAVAX:hickman Thu Apr 22 18:30:27 1982 zeus benchmarks At the January usenix, the zilog people who were showing off their Zeus machine, were giving out free "Benchmark" listings which contained the timing information for their machine. Well, it turns out that their machine Was faster than ours (a 4Mhz z8000)... But... Just to show how valid benchmarks were, I and an associate from Microsoft wrote a "Benchmark" that would specificly make our system look good. Just a long way of saying, Let the buyer beware. I have a somewhat strange way of defining the "Speed" of a system. "The snappy-ness" factor. Basically, it is a gut feeling for how responsive a system is under various activities. How long does it take to log in? Is running vi on a big file slow? Things of this nature are very subjective, but it turns out it is easy to compare via this method. One can very quickly gauge the responsive-ness (?) of a system via the snappy-ness index. Of course, running a program that does something is always useful. But one MUST understand that any benchmark, at best (!), should be considered as ~v ~v (sorry about that) anyway, take such measurements with a ton of salt... kipp ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.