How to Performance Test a Heron
When you don’t have a lab and can’t afford sophisticated equipment, you improvise with what you’ve got. As Don Rumsfeld would say, you geek with the hardware you’ve got, not the hardware you want.
So I wanted to verify my initial impression that Ubuntu’s Hardy Heron alpha seems to come bundled with some memory-management features lacking in previous versions of the Ubuntu suite, and I stumbled across an odd but effective testing instrument. A game.
It’s a fairly simple breakout style game for Linux, appropriately titled LBreakout. Simple as it is, many of the levels will severely test your CPU, memory, and graphics processor — I’ve actually seen one level titled “CPU Test.” It’s fairly common to run across levels where dozens of little balls are flying around the screen, hitting bricks and causing little explosions.*
Now there are settings in the game that can be tweaked to accommodate older hardware, such as my Gateway P4 1.3GHz machine with its 640MB of RAMBUS memory and nVidia GeForce 5500 128MB video card. You can limit the refresh rate to 100 FPS (frames per second), and turn off various animations.
I have two Ubuntu installations on this box: standard Ubuntu 7.10, the current live release, and Kubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 alpha, the test release of the next version, due to arrive in April. Playing this LBreakout game on each of these systems has shown me a lot, viz.:
The bottom line here is that Ubuntu/Kubuntu users have a lot to look forward to in Hardy Heron. Nevertheless, remember that they’re still in alpha stage with this thing. As you can see, the browser performance still needs some work. That’s msnbc.com with some of the New York Times site scrambled up with it — multiple tabs in Firefox are not behaving very well yet in this heron’s pond.
But that’s why there are alphas and betas in software development, and why you should never mess around with test releases of operating systems unless you’re a professional geek or an unbalanced individual like myself.
__________________
*A few of LBreakout’s levels reach positively artistic heights of cool, as in the “Gathina” levels, which often rival the quality of the ingeniously rounded shapes of another famous breakout game, the commercial hit known as Fairy Treasure.
