Phoronix: Why Software Defaults Are Important & Benchmarked
Almost every time benchmarks are published on Phoronix, there's always at least a handful of people - or more - that will right away say the benchmarks are flawed, meaningless, or just plain wrong. Why? Because the software configuration is tested with its default (stock) settings. These users then go on to say that the defaults are not optimized for performance and that "everyone else knows better" to use a particular set of options, etc. But it's my firm belief that it's up to the upstream maintainer -- whether it be the project itself developing the software in question or the distribution vendor that's packaging and maintaining the given component -- to choose the most sane and reliable settings, and that's what most people use. In addition, with open-source software, there's endless possibilities for how a given piece of software can be tuned and tweaked. Here's some numbers confirming these beliefs of testing software at its defaults...
Almost every time benchmarks are published on Phoronix, there's always at least a handful of people - or more - that will right away say the benchmarks are flawed, meaningless, or just plain wrong. Why? Because the software configuration is tested with its default (stock) settings. These users then go on to say that the defaults are not optimized for performance and that "everyone else knows better" to use a particular set of options, etc. But it's my firm belief that it's up to the upstream maintainer -- whether it be the project itself developing the software in question or the distribution vendor that's packaging and maintaining the given component -- to choose the most sane and reliable settings, and that's what most people use. In addition, with open-source software, there's endless possibilities for how a given piece of software can be tuned and tweaked. Here's some numbers confirming these beliefs of testing software at its defaults...
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