

Python tests used to compare different OSes - l0nwlf
http://william-os4y.livejournal.com/8436.html

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wipt
This is a very poor way to compare operating systems. Each has different
optimizations by default. That, and many many other factors make this a
terrible project. It's unfortunate that so much work was put into testing so
few things when many more things need to be considered. The set of data
(machine variations, software tuning, etc) are far too small. It doesn't
matter how many times one runs the same test on one machine if it's not the
machine he's really testing, but the operating system.

Now if it was only a matter of what operating system without tuning works best
on this one machine without tuning, then this might just legitimate.

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kstenerud
Great. Wonderful.

So what does it mean to "win" the test? What do any of those numbers even
mean?

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vytis
Doesn't it test a Python implementation on different OS rather than the OS
itself?

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neo7
python is a platform independent language. What tests does this run?

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kunley
Python's own regression tests. They are in its source distro.

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bediger
Very interesting, but these OSes are actually just 2 branches of the "unix"
tree of OSes. Too bad he didn't include Windows, or OpenVMS, very different
operating systems.

The only experiment using Windows NT vs NetBSD that I'm aware of is this: "The
Measured Performance of Personal Computer Operating Systems"
(<http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/papers/sosp95/>). On the same hardware,
for cross-platform tasks, NetBSD outperformed Windows NT. This was in 1995, so
it was probably Windows NT 3.51 and NetBSD 1.0 or 1.1

