WimMark I Benchmarks

WimMark I is a rough benchmark we have been running here at Oracle against various kernels. Each run tests an OLTP workload on the Oracle database with somewhat restrictive memory conditions. This reduces in-memory buffering of data, allowing for more I/O. The I/O is read and sync write, random and seek-laden. The runs all do ramp-up work to populate caches and the like.

The benchmark is called "WimMark I" because it has no official standing and is only a relative benchmark useful for comparing kernel changes. The benchmark is normalized an arbitrary kernel, which scores 1000.0. All other numbers are relative to this. A bigger number is a better number. All things being equal, a delta < 50 is close to unimportant, and a delta < 20 is very identical.

This benchmark is sensitive to random system events. I run three runs because of this. If two runs are nearly identical and the remaining run is way off, that run should probably be ignored (it is often a low number, signifying that something on the system impacted the benchmark).

The machine in question is a 4 way 700 MHz Xeon machine with 2GB of RAM. CONFIG_HIGHMEM4GB is selected. The disk accessed for data is a 10K RPM U2W SCSI of similar vintage. The data files are living on an ext3 filesystem. Unless mentioned, all runs are on this machine (variation in hardware would indeed change the benchmark).