[Mono-devel-list] SciMark Performance with Compilers and Runtime

[Marcus]

I've been keeping an eye on Mono's performance on SciMark for a while now, and 
I wanted to share a few observations.

First, on my system using the Mono runtime, csc-compiled versions always 
outperform the mcs-compiled versions. This is with -optimize+ passed to the 
C# compiler. The csc versions are faster whether the default optimization 
flags (for x86) are used or if -O=all is specified. Miguel didn't report 
seeing the difference in times between the compilers.

I also wanted to point out that there is frequently wide variation the 
performance from day to day. For example, here's the performance (the MFlops 
figure) from several days of the mono runtime:

D2003.09.26.04.59.55 csc: 99.05, mcs: 88.12
D2003.09.27.04.55.31 csc: 97.26, mcs: 85.05
D2003.09.28.04.47.46 csc: 97.20, mcs: 87.14
D2003.09.29.04.18.06 csc: 90.71, mcs: 84.35
D2003.09.30.04.28.59 csc: 96.40, mcs: 87.76
D2003.10.01.04.34.30 csc: 87.15, mcs: 79.99
2003.10.02.04 csc: 86.54, mcs: 79.75

(The first field is from CVS/Tag.  The C# compilers were set to optimize, and 
-O=all was passed to the runtime.)