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[OCLUG-Tech] DreamPlug benchmarking

Just a followup for anyone who might be interested in playing with ARM boxen, I bought and benchmarked a DreamPlug for my next project. To benchmark the NIC, I used iperf to get performance for the TCP stack only and nginx to get a more realistic benchmark. To benchmark the SATA link, I plugged a new Corsair Force SSD into the eSATA connector using a new disk dock and used both hdparm and dd to check read speed.

Network throughput = ~500 Mbps
SATA throughput = ~300 MB/s
EXT4 file system throughput = ~120 MB/s

The DreamPlug is CPU bound as either iperf and nginx will use 100% of the CPU. With both I tried single and multiple target client machines as well as using one or both of the NIC on the DreamPlug.

Since each NIC is usually handled by one kernel thread, a much faster ARM CPU would probably be need to saturate a GigE NIC link and multi-core ARM would be needed to push lots of data on both NIC links on something like the DreamPlug.

The Carma Tegra 3 development kit looks like what I need as development system (quad-core Cortex A9) but at $600+, ouch! :)

/sc




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