pre-2.18 performance data

[Arjan van de Ven]

Hi,

[not sure if this sort of thing is appreciated on this list; if not let me know]

Yesterday I put an early snapshot of glibc 2.18 into my distro (using
git hash 19a601f7b2fc69201c296f0720459a32dda5f4c3), to give it a spin
for compatibility and performance.
No compatibility issues so far;
on the performance side, the good news is that there are no
performance regressions in the tests that I run automatically, and
there are some real performance improvements.

The "smallpt" benchmark (floating point heavy) is showing high-double
digit %age improvements

XZ decompression, n-queens and the libxml2 performance tests all show
low single digit %age improvements

a few tests are noisy and will get run a few more times in the next 24
hours before any conclusion can be made.


graphical results are at http://linux.fenrus.org/performance/ (the
datapoints prior to July 19th are with glibc 2.17, the data points for
the 19th and later are with the above mentioned commit as system
glibc)