Re: Any X11 benchmarks out there?

On Thu, 2005-02-10 at 02:31 -0600, Mike Silbersack wrote:
> Since the topic of general system benchmarks and MySQL benchmarks has come 
> up again recently, I was wondering if anyone is aware of any X11 
> benchmarks.  While X11 performance would certainly be greatly dependent on 
> your video card, I could also see how it would stress IPC and the 
> scheduler, as the benchmark application handed off commands to the X11 
> server.  So, if there's a good benchmark, it would be useful in comparing 
> 5.3 to 4.11 to linux, etc.
> 
> The only X11 benchmark I could find in my quick searching is xbench, which 
> is very old and doesn't appear to want to build (I didn't try to figure 
> out why, I hate makefiles.)
> 
> http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/X11/contrib/utilities/xbench-0.2-src.tar.gz
> 
> Is anyone aware of something more modern?

The standard tool for benchmarking 2D X stuff is x11perf.  It tests lots
of core protocol stuff, i.e. not the stuff that's really important in
terms of performance these days.  These days the X Server is spending a
lot more time grubbing around in framebuffer memory (really, really
slow) due to the lack of Render acceleration.

3D probably isn't important to test, as it's all done client-side
(almost no IPC) if you've got acceleration.  And never use glxgears for
benchmarking the 3d drivers or I will have to beat you senseless.

-- 
Eric Anholt                                eta_at_lclark.edu          
http://people.freebsd.org/~anholt/         anholt_at_FreeBSD.org