I’m curious what sort of compression performance Ampere Altra and maybe AmpereOne has to offer with xz. I’m looking into if Ampere Altra could be a suitable replacement for Nix’s CI host server. Right now, we run a Ryzen 5950X and we’re experiencing high temps which is causing throttling. Some of the infra folks are looking into replacements and I’m looking into what Ampere can offer in that regards. Compression is the primary workload we need the most performance in.
Are you compressing a few big files or lots of little ones?
I see “pixz” which is a multicore / manycore version of “xz”, a few years old, don’t have any personal experience with it but I’d look at this:
to see how it affects your workflow.
We’re compressing packages, Nix is a package manager and the compression we do is the output of every derivation. So there’s a mix of a lot of big and small stuff. Also, heard that pixz might not help because the workloads are CPU bound and that more threads to a process doesn’t help.
If you have a newer version of xz, it’ll use multiple cores by default. On older 5.4.x versions you can set -T threads manually since the default is 1. You can see the man page at xz(1) — xz.
I’m aware but I’m wondering if there’s any existing benchmarks of XZ’s performance on the Ampere Altra.
Send me the test, and I will help you run it on my Q64-22 machine, AMD 5965WX or 2x Xeon 8272CL.
I previously did a compression test with zstd against 2x Xeon Platinium 8272CL. My single Q64-22 finished in 29 seconds and only consumed ~32W. The dual Xeon only needs 25.5 seconds but consumes about ~365W.
I don’t have a benchmark for XZ because I haven’t figured out the best way to benchmark it on my Q64-22. I was thinking someone who has an Ampere system already benchmarked XZ at some point.