The SPEC SDET workload (officially known as 057.sdet) models an office-automation, programming development environment. The workload is characterized by high-frequency UNIX command execution, notably compiler, text processing, and file management functions. While the workload places lower demands on overall memory consumption than observed for typical production applications, it does stress the control (e.g., lock management and page allocations) of the resources used in process creation and termination, and as such is a good indicator of "interactive" UNIX command behavior.
The performance metric for the SDET workload is "scripts per hour", a function of the number of allocated user scripts or "clones", and how fast their combined loads run to completion. The peak throughput is obtained by incrementing the number of clones until throughput has obviously declined.
The SPEC SDET throughput results indicate that A+Edition 1.0 provides substantial performance improvements over Solaris 2.3 for large MP servers. The significant improvements by Sun in Solaris 2.4 are also evident. The A+Edition 1.1 builds upon these improvements, especially in systems with a large number of processors.
The SDET MP Throughput results indicate how well system performance improves as additional CPUs are added to the system. A measurement of this added performance is the MP factor. This indicates the portion of additional CPU compute cycles that are available from the CPU when it is added to the system.
Increasing the number of CPUs in a system generally increases the performance of the system up to the point at which the overhead of supporting the additional CPUs is larger than the added processing capability. This point of decreasing performance is a function of both the system hardware and software. For all of the performance results presented here, the tests were conducted on the same hardware system, only the underlying operating system was changed.
The results indicate that for the SDET benchmark, the A+Edition provides improved performance as additional CPUs are added to the system. This is especially apparent in Release 1.1 where the improvements in base Solaris 2.4 and the enhancements of the A+Edition produce a highly scalable system.