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Comment by diffeomorphism | Hacker News Reader

> but without the fundamental flaws, such as benchmarking compilers instead of the OS, building stuff with wrong flags,

That is not a flaw but simply benchmarking something else. "This would be the performance if you changed all those settings, fixed these errors etc." might be a nice academic exercise, but "this is the performance you get out of the box" seems much, much more relevant.

So you are not benchmarking "the OS" but rather the distribution, which includes whatever compiler version or flags they chose to use.

Honest question: If I take the exact same binary and shared libraries and run it on different distros, what am I actually measuring as differences? Kernel configs, filesystem, background processes? Does the distro even matter for that?

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That would be true if they actually measured the applications installed with the system/distribution, or at least built the way they should get built with a given system/distribution - which they don't.

Any comparison will have flaws but Phoronix has a track record for having bad non Linux benchmarks. People complain because they want a fair comparison.

Benchmarks are vital. They can give you an estimate of how your application performs. They also often showcase how optimized a product is on different platforms.

That answers none of my questions?

If you get different results, the difference comes from the parts that hadn't changed. So if you were to run the exact same binaries in different environment (different operating system, or same operating system but built or configured differently) and you got different results, you'd be measuring differences between environments.

But that's kind of obvious, so why are you asking this?

Because they proposed "fixing" the benchmarks by doing this, at which point I am asking what you hope to see in the benchmark if everything is the same.

They consider difference due to compiler versions to be "wrong", differences in flags to be "wrong" etc. . So "the difference comes from the parts that hadn't changed", yeah which ones would you permit to change to consider the benchmark not "wrong"?

The difference due to compiler versions isn’t wrong. What’s wrong is attributing it to the operating system. Especially given how easy it would be to just keep the same compiler version.

The problem with Phoronix v the build flags is not that they are different between systems/distros; quite the opposite: Phoronix builds the software in an unsupported way, ignoring system/distribution defaults. Which means, they measure software that’s miscompiled/misconfigured.

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