How much faster is Pro vs Pink?

[Socaltom]

I'm running a pogoplug as a samba server, and PyTivo server to store video content for my Tivo. The pyTivo works well, as long as I save the files in the mpeg2 format the tivo can use. It I ask the pogoplug to convert it from mp4 to mpeg2 on the fly its waaaay too slow.

I've also tried streambaby, which is a nice program, but it runs slower than pyTivo. Even with the transconding turned off It streams slower than the speed necessary to watch. So my question is, if I upgrade to a Pogoplug Pro, will I get a noticable performance boost?

The pogoplug running pyTivo transfer files at about 6Mbps, using Streambaby it drops to about 3.5, ( I can transfer files from my windows box located next to the pogo at about 15Mbps, so its not a network issue)

Can I expect 10?Mbps from the Pro?
Thanks
Tom

[WarheadsSE]

Well I haven't tried either of those programs, but I have used samba to an ext3 and ext 4 drive over the sata port and hit in excess of 20Mbps. USB performance for me depends on the format of the drive, but my ntfs 1TB averages about 12 Mbps. I would have to benchmark the performance of my minidlna server, but I regularly streak 2GB mkv files encoded to h264 and ac3 with 5.1 dolby without any issues, to PCs, mobiles and DVD players in my house.

As for transcoding, it is no beast, but the fact that the Pro is a dual core, despite being clocked at 700Mhz, it stays more responsive. If compiling is any comparison, there is definitely some gain due to this fact.

[kmihelich]

It really does come down to what filesystem is used on the drive connected to the plug. NTFS just won't be fast, it has to go through multiple layers to get the data. Using a Linux-native filesystem like ext3/4 you can easily hit 20-30MB/sec on an unencrypted transfer. If you throw encryption in (sftp, https) you're going back down into sub-7MB/sec territory.

With any plug it really comes down to three things.. the type of drive (flash, hard drive), the filesystem on it, and how many other things are also plugged into usb.

[Socaltom]

I've got 2 drives attached. The system is on an 80g 2.5 ext2 drive. The videos are on a 160 g ext3 drive. Transfer speed is great. Streaming speed is jusr a bit too slow. It sounds like I should se improvement, whether it will have enough to do the transcoding
Tom

[Socaltom]

Well, I got the pro up and running. I can't get the phoronix tests working, but I did an ffmpeg conversion as a benchmark between the two systems.
the pink pogo v2 converted my small file in 6 minutes ( the video is 160 seconds long)
the pogoplug pro took 10 minutes.
It appears that ffmpeg only took advantage of one cpu 700mhz/1200mhz is pretty close to the same ratio as 10 minutes vs 6 minutes.

I also did a file transfer test and had each machine transfer a video to a tivo. the pink did it at 5.86 Mbps
the Pro did it at 6.85Mbps.

All in all I would say that the pro isn't appreciably faster for the file transfers ( I've seen over 9Mbps with the pink)

with some activities the pro is clearly slower.
Tom

[WarheadsSE]

Correct, in the cases where the program is not designed to make use of both cores, there will certainly be a difference. For those where multiple processes are involved, such as file transfers, depending on the interaction, the Pro will be faster. When transferring via Samba, to an ext3 target I have actually hit > 20MB/s.

There are of course other instances, and I will work with leming to see what we can do about getting that benchmark running on the Pro, so we have solid numbers.

As the OXNAS becomes more prevalent, and we continue to invest time in the platform as a community, the disparity between the two will become more obvious.

[Socaltom]

The phoronix pkg indicated I need php zip and php json. I found php zip and installed but it still says it was missing.
It ran on the pink v2, but I installed the LAMP package which may have the required files.
I've seen thatt ffmpeg has some multi-thread capabilities, but clearly I didn't see them
I'm happy with the a Pro regardless, and ulimatley files are tranferring faster.on a different Tivo I got over 10Mbps, which is faster than I've seen from the pink
Thanks for all your efforts.
Tom

Edit-- Apparently I didn't read the fine print while installing phoronix. I just had to edit the etc/php/php.ini file per the instructions on screen during the install

[Socaltom]

So here are the Scimark results for the Pro
Composite = 6.26 Mflops ( 7.94 for the Pink v2)
Fast Fourier = 2.84 Mflops (3.84 for the Pink)
Jacobi Successive Over-Relaxation 8.85Mflops (11.38 Mflops for the pink)
Monte Carlo = 4.31 MFlops (6.01 for the pink)s
Sparse Matrix Multiply = 7.32Mflops (8.98 for the pink)
Dense Matrix Factorization = 7.97Mflops ( 9.51 for the pink)

In each case more Mflops is better. This tests continues to indicate that the pink v2 is faster than the Pogoplug pro.

Tom

Link to the results
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1106 ... OGOPLUGP57
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1105 ... OGOPINK486

[kmihelich]

I like seeing these kinds of results, would be neat to get a comprehensive table set up on the wiki or upcoming new site to show a solid comparison.

[Socaltom]

I reran the tests on the pink pogo, and compared to the Pogoplug pro
http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1106066-IV-1106064IV89

Tom