Tag Archives: benchmark

Apple iPhone 4S Cellular Network comparison AT&T 3G vs Sprint 3G (video)

Last week Apple released the newest iPhone 4S in the United States for all three major wireless carriers: AT&T, Sprint and Verizon.

As an iPhone user I wanted to compare the wireless networks of AT&T, my current carrier since the release of the iPhone 3GS in 2009, and Sprint the defacto Unlimited data wireless carrier since all data plans from the other major carriers carry a data-cap.

This is the first time that Sprint carries Apple’s flagship phone and despite the amaizing features of the phone, as you can see in the video, the wireless network of Sprint falls short of expectations for a proper iPhone experience to support YouTube streaming, data downloading, etc.

Further the video shows AT&T constantly offering amazing speeds (probably thanks to HDSPA+ wireless data technology only available for AT&T iPhones) in comparison to Sprint’s poor network performance during ping, download and web browsing tests.

For the time being AT&T will keep me as a customer, thanks to their superior data speeds and thanks to fact that AT&T is the only carrier to support web-browsing while on a call. If Sprint enhances their network to offer at least 100 KB/s (1MB steady downstream) they may become the defacto winner for new and current iPhone users looking to save some money (I could save $15+ a month by switching to Sprint). However due to their poor network performance I decided to stick with AT&T. I would love to hear about your experiences with the Sprint iPhone 4S on their network.

Setup Filebench on Solaris for benchmarking

Like any other newbie on Solaris, I didn’t know how to install the packages, I am used to yum or apt-get install but anyway on Solaris I did:

Giovanni@server:~/Downloads/filebench-1.4.8# pkg install SUNWfilebench
DOWNLOAD                                    PKGS       FILES     XFER (MB)
Completed                                    1/1       60/60     0.32/0.32

PHASE                                        ACTIONS
Install Phase                                  82/82
Giovanni@server:~/Downloads/filebench-1.4.8#

and it was installed 🙂 Use pkg search to search for packages.

Giovanni@server:/usr/benchmarks/filebench# bin/go_filebench
FileBench Version 1.4.4
filebench> load varmail
742: 3.707: Varmail Version 2.1 personality successfully loaded
742: 3.707: Usage: set $dir=<dir>
742: 3.707:        set $filesize=<size>    defaults to 16384
742: 3.707:        set $nfiles=<value>     defaults to 1000
742: 3.707:        set $nthreads=<value>   defaults to 16
742: 3.707:        set $meaniosize=<value> defaults to 16384
742: 3.707:        set $readiosize=<size>  defaults to 1048576
742: 3.707:        set $meandirwidth=<size> defaults to 1000000
742: 3.707: (sets mean dir width and dir depth is calculated as log (width, nfiles)
742: 3.707:  dirdepth therefore defaults to dir depth of 1 as in postmark
742: 3.707:  set $meandir lower to increase depth beyond 1 if desired)
742: 3.707:
742: 3.707:        run runtime (e.g. run 60)
filebench> set $dir=/gpool
filebench> run 60
742: 27.078: Creating/pre-allocating files and filesets
742: 27.081: Fileset bigfileset: 1000 files, 0 leafdirs avg dir = 1000000, avg depth = 0.5, mbytes=15
742: 27.096: Removed any existing fileset bigfileset in 1 seconds
742: 27.096: making tree for filset /gpool/bigfileset
742: 27.096: Creating fileset bigfileset…
742: 35.092: Preallocated 812 of 1000 of fileset bigfileset in 8 seconds
742: 35.092: waiting for fileset pre-allocation to finish
742: 35.092: Starting 1 filereader instances
744: 36.102: Starting 16 filereaderthread threads
742: 39.112: Running…
742: 99.712: Run took 60 seconds…
742: 99.713: Per-Operation Breakdown
closefile4                449ops/s   0.0mb/s      0.0ms/op        3us/op-cpu
readfile4                 449ops/s   7.0mb/s      0.0ms/op       19us/op-cpu
openfile4                 449ops/s   0.0mb/s      0.0ms/op       18us/op-cpu
closefile3                449ops/s   0.0mb/s      0.0ms/op        3us/op-cpu
fsyncfile3                449ops/s   0.0mb/s     17.4ms/op       20us/op-cpu
appendfilerand3           449ops/s   3.5mb/s      0.0ms/op       27us/op-cpu
readfile3                 449ops/s   7.0mb/s      0.0ms/op       18us/op-cpu
openfile3                 449ops/s   0.0mb/s      0.0ms/op       18us/op-cpu
closefile2                449ops/s   0.0mb/s      0.0ms/op        3us/op-cpu
fsyncfile2                449ops/s   0.0mb/s     17.9ms/op       17us/op-cpu
appendfilerand2           449ops/s   3.5mb/s      0.0ms/op       23us/op-cpu
createfile2               449ops/s   0.0mb/s      0.1ms/op       52us/op-cpu
deletefile1               449ops/s   0.0mb/s      0.0ms/op       33us/op-cpu

742: 99.713:
IO Summary:      353667 ops, 5836.1 ops/s, (898/898 r/w)  21.0mb/s,     78us cpu/op,   8.9ms latency
742: 99.713: Shutting down processes
filebench>
742: 110.144: Aborting…

Going back to normal