Lab 6 - Reflection

Welcome to my reflection for Lab 6. The task assigned for lab 6 was to test the performance of an algorithm meant to modify the volume of music samples. There were 3 versions of this algorithm that all had different approaches to this problem. This post will cover the results that my group and myself concluded to during our testing.

Test results:

Legend:

vol1 - First Algorithm
vol2 - Second Algorithm
vol3 - Third Algorithm

no processing - When the code that modified the music samples was commented out.

Before I discuss our results I will first cover how we conducted the tests. What we did was to run each version of the algorithm twice on all of the machines in the spreadsheet above. In addition we ran each algorithm with the volume modification code commented out. This was done so we can see how much of an impact that the volume modification code had on all of the machines tested. The algorithm times were obtained by using the command "time <application name>". What this did was run the application and at the end output how long it took to execute the program.

In terms of the results what stood out includes the following. First, was that on most of the machines each algorithm had similar times to each other, only deviating by around 1 or 2 seconds. The exception to this would be the Aarchie arm_64 machine as the second algorithm took at least 9 seconds in real time to complete when compared to the other algorithms that ran on that machine. Another finding that stood out, was that the ARM machines tested took around 27 to 62 seconds in real time to execute each of these algorithms but the xerxes x86_64 machine only took around 5 seconds in real time to complete each of these tasks. The last thing that stood out, was what happened when the volume modification code was commented out more specifically on the arm_64 machines. On most of the machines removing the volume mod code would shave off around 1 - 2 real time seconds in execution time. However, on the Aarchie machine removing that code cut execution time by around 4 - 13 real time seconds.