Benchmarking Retro

Retro now has a small, but working, set of benchmarks. This is in the svn repo and can be found in bin/bench. To use the benchmarks, you'll need a console build of Ngaro, a Retro image, a Unix-like host system, and Perl.

  cd bin/bench
./make-image
./run-bench

The timings for each test will be displayed when the test completes. There are currently three tests:

• Recursive FIB
• Countdown Loop
• Call/Return (nesting) Pairs

I expect to see this grow into a more complete set of benchmarks in the future. For now, this should suffice for basic performance testing.

Initial results:

Host: ZenWalk 5 (Linux)
GCC: 4.1.2
CPU: Pentium 4 2.8GHz (1 core)
RAM: 1.5gb

Switched VM:
Recursive FIB (39)... 225.540318 seconds
Countdown Loop (1,000,000)... 13.616979 seconds
Nest/Unnest (256 million pairs)... 36.356847 seconds

Threaded VM:
Recursive FIB (39)... 212.555673 seconds
Countdown Loop (1,000,000)... 13.995988 seconds
Nest/Unnest (256 million pairs)... 33.026269 seconds