Enough folks have emailed me asking for the details on the totally-unscientific and Silly Micro-Benchmarks I did that I decided to paste the last response:
> Could you share your microbenchmark test suite?
ab from httpd-2.2.4
> How did you test?
Spent about 10 minutes per server configuring it to the best of my knowledge (which is actually reasonably good for most of them) and wrote the most efficient hello world application I could for each.
> Which hardware,
An Apple PowerMac 2x dual core 2.66ghz xeon thingie with 6 gigs of ram for the server, an powerbook 2x2ghz CoreDuo with 2 gigs of ram for the client.
> networking stuff
An airport 8 port 10/100 switch
> , and so on. How your test result can be reproducible?
Pretty much cannot be reproduced in a meaningful way, which is the point :-)
-Brian
Anyway, that is that. I have been having fun with commons-math tonight while debugging some stuff, so might have to do some more, but with stats to make them look more valid!