hint – A scalable benchmark for testing CPU and memory

I was about to change the 486 in fred.nz.freebsd.org for a Pentium. I installed
and used hint to see the performance differences.

Installing hint

hint is available in the ports under /usr/ports/benchmarks/hint.
Because I had all the port skeletons installed, the installation was simple:

cd /usr/ports/benchmarks/hint
make
make install

Running hint

Running wasn’t so easy. My first attempt failed:

# hint
         _    _
         |    |  _ _   _ _____ TM
         |--  |  | |\  | | | |
         |  --|  | | \ |   |
         |    |  | |  \|   |
         ^    ^  ^ ^   ^   ^

*** The  HINT  PERFORMANCE ANALYZER ***
        Version 1.0  June 1994
   John L. Gustafson & Quinn O. Snell
     Scalable Computing Laboratory
   236 Wilhelm, Iowa State University
        Ames, Iowa    50011-3020
            (515) 294 - 9294

Copyright (C) 1994 Iowa State University Research Foundation, Inc.
Please send results and questions to:   hint@scl.ameslab.gov
When sending results please follow the form in README
________________________________________________________
RECT is 72 bytes
Could not open data file

So I did what everyone would do. RTFM. In was in the man pages that I found
this:

     The output of hint is a file in the directory data named DOUBLE which
     contains five columns:

     1.   Time

     2.   QUIPS

     3.   Quality

     4.   Subintervals

So I created a data directory:

mkdir data

And I ran my tests again.

But every time I ran hints, it ran out of virtual memory and was killed. No such
luck. Perhaps another day.

hint – A scalable benchmark for testing CPU and memory