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Thin Clients: Benchmarks 

Benchmarks

Introduction

Make of this page what you will. To corrupt an old saying... "There are lies, damned lies and benchmarks". Anyway, as noted on the Tools page, I was interested in the relative performance of the various thin clients I had and so created a simple benchmark to measure their performance as web servers. The benchmark measurements are actually run on a copy of the 'thin' section of this site - currently ~160 pages occupying ~30MB.

In all cases the actual web server being used is Apache.

The benchmark code is run on 2.8GHz P4 HT system running Fedora Core 13.

Results

An example of the output from the benchmark is:

** WebServerTest.pl version 1.00 starting at Sat Sep  4 06:48:51 2010
Tests run on Host: 192.168.10.18 50 times with 20 copies and average delay of 0 seconds
Transactions:           1000
Elapsed time:           9.187 sec
Bytes Transferred:      8617035 bytes
Response Time:          0.18 sec
Transaction Rate:       108.85 trans/sec
Throughput:             937970.64 bytes/sec
Concurrency:            19.4
Status Code 200:        1000
** WebServerTest.pl version 1.00 ending at Sat Sep  4 06:49:00 2010

The key data from the output is summarised in the table below.

Thin Client System/Storage Processor Speed Response time
(sec)
Transaction Rate
trans/sec
Throughput
bytes/sec
Neoware CA5DSL/Hard diskSiS550200MHz 0.4047.46397k
Neoware CA5DSL/CFSiS550200MHz 0.3848.82410k
Neoware CapioPuppyServer/CFGeode GX1300MHz 0.8323.6198k
Neoware CapioDSL/CFGeode GX1300MHz 0.3162.9522k
Wyse SX0DSL/CFGeode GX500366MHz 0.18108.85940k
IGEL 2110LXPuppy/CFVIA Eden400MHz 0.17114.11945k
Neoware CA21DSL/CFVia Eden800MHz 0.17115.8976k
HP T5530DSL/CFVia C7800MHz 0.17114.3984k

Notes:

  • If you have sufficient memory then the media used (disk/compact flash) does not affect the performance as the pages end up cached in memory. The pages randomly accessed by the benchmark occupy ~30MB.
  • The poor performance figures for the PuppyServer on the Neoware Capio reflect an error in my implementation. It turns out Apache's logs are being written to the Compact Flash and so it is the updating of these logs that is slowing the machine down.

 


Any comments? email me. Added September 2010