Benchmarked comparison of terminal support systems for IBM 360 computers
Gordon H. Syms · ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review · 1974
A set of terminal scripts and benchmarks were derived for comparing the performance of time sharing and batch computer operating systems. Some of the problems encountered in designing valid benchmarks for comparing computer operating systems under both terminal and batch loads are discussed.The results of comparing TSS/360, CP/67 and MTS time sharing systems for the IBM 360/67 over a wide range of load conditions are presented. The results of comparing TSS, MTS and OS/MVT under batch loads are also presented. The tests were conducted with Simplex and Dual processor configurations with 256K bytes to 768K bytes of main memory.The conclusions were quite surprizing in that CP/67 running on a minimal system performed competitively with TSS/360 on a much larger dual processor system. With equal configurations CP/67 out performed TSS/360 by a wide margin. Furthermore, MTS providing both batch and terminal support produced performance that was 5 percent to 25 percent better than the split configuration with CP/67 providing the terminal support and OS/MVT providing the batch processing support.Serious performance degradation of the time sharing computer systems from overloading was experienced and a simple solution is suggested to prevent such degradation. The degradation was so severe as to render the performance less than that of a sequential job processor system.