Benchmarking a slow machine
Overview When performing benchmarks I usually reach for the fastest machine I can. The theory is that if speed matters you will use a fast machine. Recently I have tried benchmarking the slowest machine I have access to. A Pentium IV dual core laptop with 4 GB of memory and a regular HDD. The assumption is that if this performs better than your need, it might not matter how fast your system is. In the article, I am comparing this laptop to a fast machine . The point is, if the slow machine is more than enough you don't need to worry about hardware. Latency test The round trip average latencies tests were 10 times slower and there were over 1000x more delayed messages. Even so, a delay of an average of 4 micro-seconds is faster than many applications need. The average RTT latency was 3,442 ns. The 50/99 / 99.9/99.99%tile latencies were 1,790/1,790 / 103,550/2,147,483,647. There were 39,891 delays over 100 μs Throughput test The biggest difference I saw in the