I was curious how my home machine performs compared to my work machine. Each of these have 4 logical processors (and 8GB of RAM), so are sort of comparable. I also added the DigitalOcean VPS with those specs (currently $80 per month) because... why not.
Machine Specs
Each machine runs Debian testing (codename "jessie"). Following is the output of these commands for each machine:
uname --all
cat /proc/cpuinfo | sed --quiet '5p'
Home machine:
Linux thome 3.11-trunk-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.11-1~exp1 (2013-09-12) x86_64 GNU/Linux
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-2410M CPU @ 2.30GHz
Work machine:
Linux twork 3.10-3-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.10.11-1 (2013-09-10) x86_64 GNU/Linux
model name : AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 970 Processor
DigitalOcean VPS:
Linux tcloud 3.11-1-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.11.5-1 (2013-10-17) x86_64 GNU/Linux
model name : QEMU Virtual CPU version 1.0
CPython benchmarks
I ran two benchmarks, both from the latest VCS version of CPython, development branch:
$ hg identify --id --branch
b6a1a78818fe default
Build
Here's the command I used:
make distclean; time (./configure && make --silent --jobs=4)
Results
Home machine:
real 2m11.687s
user 3m18.104s
sys 0m9.964s
Work machine:
real 2m2.707s
user 2m24.200s
sys 0m12.280s
VPS:
real 2m30.931s
user 3m7.272s
sys 0m16.592s
Test suite
Here's the command I used:
time ./python -m test --multiprocess=0
--multiprocess=0 means that there will be 6 tests run in parallel; that is the number logical cores (4 in my case) + 2 (to avoid waiting too long for tests which are largely idle)
Results
Home machine:
real 3m42.571s
user 7m13.124s
sys 0m33.320s
Work machine:
real 2m29.957s
user 4m9.052s
sys 0m27.364s
VPS:
real 2m19.174s
user 5m5.444s
sys 0m40.008s
Linux kernel build
Just for kicks, I decided to check how long building Linux would take; for this, I used latest 'final' release from Linus' git tree:
$ git log -1
commit 6e4664525b1db28f8c4e1130957f70a94c19213e
Author: Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>
Date: Mon Sep 2 13:46:10 2013 -0700
Linux 3.11
Here's the commands I used:
make distclean && make defconfig && time make
Results
Home machine:
real 6m11.622s
user 21m2.664s
sys 1m15.324s
Work machine:
real 2m40.275s
user 8m55.624s
sys 0m42.860s
VPS:
real 3m41.240s
user 12m21.120s
sys 1m17.844s
Conclusion
My work machine is faster than the DigitalOcean offering of comparable specs, and much faster than my home machine, a laptop.