The 3-day IOzone test ...

Ugh … I had thought that I would be able to use VC++ to build IOzone. Well, I haven’t been successful at this. IOzone, like many other OSS codes use autoconf. Which hasn’t been ported to enable people to use VC++.

So I used Cygwin to build bonnie++ and IOzone. IOzone has been running, oh, about 3 days now, on the windows 2003 server x64 unit. With a 32GB file size, performance pretty much falls off the radar. Actually, performance fell over at 16GB. At 8GB, we were seeing serious weakness. Overall performance isn’t great. This hardware roars under Linux. I am thinking that it is a combination of a number of things here: Cygwin doesn’t use windows as well as it could, and the windows platform makes it hard to optimize performance. Specifically, I don’t seem to have control over the stripe width for the RAID0 across dynamic disks. Finally, this is a 64 bit OS, so 32 bit function calls (Cygwin->windows) probably have to go through a mapping layer (aka a thunking layer) somewhere. At least we are getting number under windows. Now if Microsoft wants to do something interesting, adjusting cygwin so that it works with VC++ (and is fast and native ABI) is a good start. Programs would be automagically portable.