# core 2 dual benchmark



## screenpro (Jun 24, 2011)

Hi all,

I'm very new to the FreeBSD OS, hopefully someone will help me with this. I just upgraded my FreeBSD 8.2 32bit HP P4 system to a dual core Dell 490 FreeBSD 8.2 64bit 4GB of RAM with a 500 GB SATA drive. 

I was doing a benchmark on the Dell 490 by copying a 500 MB file locally to the same directory. It took almost 35 seconds to complete while it only took 5 second on the P4. This is very puzzling to me because the Core 2 Dual is supposed to be much faster than the P4. Am I supposed to install some special driver on the 64bit system?

Any help for the newbie will be appreciated.
Fenton


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## phoenix (Jun 24, 2011)

Copying a file only tests the disk speed, not the CPU/RAM, etc.


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## wblock@ (Jun 25, 2011)

A Core 2 Duo is dual core, but not called Dual.

Anyway, benchmarking is a tricky field.  Everything has to be the same except the component under test, and here you've changed pretty much everything.  Do the two systems have the same filesystems?  Have settings been changed on the faster one, like filesystems mounted with noatime?  Is caching at work, where the first copy will be slow but the second much faster?  They don't have the same drives or controllers--is the new drive a cheap, slow one?  32-bit versus 64-bit, amount of RAM, numerous other differences.

benchmarks/bonnie++ is a decent benchmark.


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## sang (Jun 25, 2011)

Another thing to check is if the new machine might be running the hard drive(s) in IDE emulation mode. That was the default at least in my desktop and server machines' BIOSs. This caused the disks in those machines to be quite slow. If this is the case you need to switch the SATA controller to AHCI mode in your machine's BIOS. Note that this will change the device names so you will have a non-bootable system unless you do a few changes described in these guides by wblock:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/ahci.html
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/html/labels.html


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