Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 9th Nov 2005 18:21 UTC, submitted by Peter Harmsen
"Ok, that headline may be a bit overblown - but Microsoft Research has released part of a report on the Singularity kernel they've been working on as part of their planned shift to network computing. The report includes some performance comparisons that show Singularity beating everything else on a 1.8Ghz AMD Athlon-based machine. What's noteworthy about it is that Microsoft compared Singularity to FreeBSD and Linux as well as Windows/XP - and almost every result shows Windows losing to the two Unix variants."
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Member since:2005-07-06
Congratulations, you win the moron award for this thread.
Have you completely missed the point of Singularity? It's a research OS, not a replacement for UNIX or Windows. There is no point in writing a fancy scheduler or fully-compliant network stack for Siingularity. They aren't researching schedulers or network stacks. What they are researching is a fundamentally different protection model for the operating system. As such, the microbenchmarks are interesting, because they show how Singularity reduces the basic cost of accessing OS services dramatically, even compared to very optimized implementations of traditional designs.
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Well, the article is full of apples and oranges comparaisons, and is utterly flawed (like comparing sockets on Linux/BSD with pipes on Windows and channels on Sing, even though Linux/BSD have pipes too).
All the Windows zealots here won't believe me if I say that this OS performs poorly, given that :
- It uses a poor round robin scheduler, compared with the powerful schedulers of Linux/BSD
- The Linux/BSD are crippled in all tests (for example, they statically link their "Hello World" only on Linux/BSD, and then compare binary sizes with Windows/Sing, which are not statically linked of course)
- The Singularity OS tested is unusable and has nowhere near the same functionalities of Linux/BSD
But the best evidence is in the report itself, look at section 6.3. Here's an enlightening excerpt :
"To quantify the overhead of Singularity's extension mechanism in a more realistic scenario, we measured the performance of the SPECweb99 benchmark".A note says that they are not even full IPv4 compliant in the bench, bench warm-up reduced, length of execution reduced, server logging absent, ..., gives you an idea of why the previous benchs are better on Sing.
Here is an excerpt of the results (keep in mind that Linux runs circles around Windows 2003 on this bench) : "Singularity achieves 91 ops/s with a weighted average thoughput of 362 Kb/s. MS Windows 2003 running the IIS server ... achieves 761 ops/s with a weighted average throughput of 336 Kb/s."
Don't go yet, here comes the worse : "System instability under heavy load and file system performance bottlenecks ... consequently reduced Singularity's overall score."
And even worse "Singularity's network stack ... can sustain a transmission throughput of 48 Mb/sec", remember that it is not even IPv4 compliant yet.
So when I hear Windows zealot say OMG Syng roxorz, it's funny at best.