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CPU performance: Azure VM vs DELL M4700.

How powerful Azure VMs are in regard to CPU intensive operations (e.g., file compression)?
I decide to compare Azure VMs with my DELL M4700 laptop for file compression operations.


I created one VM of size A6 in the US-East2 region. Size A6 means 4 CPUs, 28 GB of RAM, and 127 GB on the system drive.
The second VM has size D4 in the US-East region. D4 is a newly announce type of VMs that comes with SSD disks presented as drive D: (non-persistent drive).
The D4 size has 8 CPUs', 28 GB of RAM, and 400 GB of the temporary drive D: (backed by SSD disks).

Both VMs report the same CPU information

Caption           : Intel64 Family 6 Model 45 Stepping 7
DeviceID          : CPU0
Manufacturer      : GenuineIntel
MaxClockSpeed     : 2200
Name              : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2660 0 @ 2.20GHz
SocketDesignation : None


On my DELL M4700 laptop the CPU information is

Caption           : Intel64 Family 6 Model 58 Stepping 9
DeviceID          : CPU0
Manufacturer      : GenuineIntel
MaxClockSpeed     : 2691
Name              : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-3740QM CPU @ 2.70GHz
SocketDesignation : SOCKET 0


For testing the compression speed I used 7-zip v9.20 (64-bit) and these 8 text files (~2.2 GB in the combined size)

     Length Name
     ------ ----
      17160 BaseStationTimeZone.txt
       9484 ConfirmedDates.txt
   83204047 defile.txt
  345493392 DEMfile.txt
  230128233 EPfile.txt
    3347224 ProgramTitle.txt
  187435204 SWDfile.txt
 1494921513 SWOfile.txt


The resulting archive has a compression ratio 5%.

On the D4 VM all these text files were placed on the drive D: (SSD disks) and on A4 and the laptop the files were placed on the system disk

I ran the tests on each server multiple times (34 times on A4 and 62 on D4) using this batch file

@ECHO OFF

 SET LogFile="C:\TEMP\%~n0.LOG"
DEL %LogFile% 1>nul 2>nul
ECHO^.>yes.file

 FOR /L %%i IN (1,1,1000) DO (
DEL TEST.7z 1>nul 2>nul

 ECHO *********  Iteration # %%i  ************ >>%LogFile%
echo Start time:>>%LogFile%
TIME <yes.file >>%LogFile%
"c:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe" a test *.TXT   1>nul 2>nul
echo End time:>>%LogFile%
TIME <yes.file >>%LogFile%
ECHO^.>>%LogFile%
ECHO^.>>%LogFile%
ECHO ---------                   ------------ >>%LogFile%
)


and averaged the results (there was very little variation in the results).
The results clearly show (the low the number the better) that when using a compression program like 7-zip (single threaded) then none of Azure VM's can challenge the DELL M4700 laptop





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