XL1200 Benchmarks.

[pvs@JAZZ.al.alcoa.com (Peter Van Sickel)]

We had a loaner XL1200 for a couple of days and set up a Statice
application on it to see how it would perform.  We then tried the same
application on a 3620 and an XL400.  

The application is fairly simple.  It's very IO intensive so it's not
your typical benchmark perhaps.  We ran the tests under released Genera
8.0.  We have a Statice database of 7,000 records.  The records are
typically between 1500 and 2500 bytes in size.  We have a Hypercard
interface on a Mac II that connects to the Symbolics server using MacTCP
and requests a record from the Symbolics.  A Mac server process starts
up on the Symbolics and interprets the request, retrieves the record
from the database, converts the record into something Hypercard can
display (converts all attribute values into strings), and sends the
record back to the Mac.  The database for all tests resided on the same
machine as the one serving the Mac.  The times listed are the mean and
median of 132 requests made as fast as the Hypercard application could
run through a file of requests to simulate a human making the same
requests (a request for a record was issued roughly every 10 to 15
seconds).  The means and medians are for the elapsed time within the
server process from the time it first starts up until it goes away after
servicing a request.  Nothing fancy is done with keeping the process
around to see if an additional request is coming or to keep the TCP/IP
channel open.  No one was using the test machines for anything else
while the test was running.

Machine		Mean	Median	
XL1200		1.54	1.53	
XL400		4.72	4.72	
3620		6.23	5.94	

I attribute the fact that the XL400 isn't all that much faster than a
3620 to the fact that IO is the bottleneck for this application.  It
looks to me like the IO subsystem was dramatically improved for the
XL1200 to get the big speed up that we're seeing for this application.
 
Using the XL1200 gives sub 5 second total response time to the 
Macintosh user.  This was our performance goal.  We're very happy with
the advent of the XL1200.  We're working convincing our management
that we should buy some.



Peter Van Sickel
Alcoa Laboratories
Pittsburgh, PA