Linux kernel compilation benchmark, measured as wall-clock time.

Tests:
 [1] time tar -jxf /scratch/linux-2.6.37.tar.bz2
 [2] time find linux-2.6.37 -type f -print0 | sort -z | xargs -0 sha1sum >/dev/null  # checksum 35187 files, 392.9 MiB total

==============================================================================
NFS in EC2
2011-03-08

 [1] 65m39.250s
 [2] 26m26.267s

==============================================================================
Native NFS on c09-45
2011-03-08

 [1] 10m18.149s
     11m2.714s          (re-run)
 [2] 0m25.813s

==============================================================================
Local disk on c09-45
2011-03-08

 [1] 30.465s            (including final sync; decompression: 0m15.865s)
 [2] 0m2.453s

==============================================================================
Local disk on c09-45, mount with -o sync
2011-03-08

 [1] 3m5.226s

==============================================================================
BlueSky, US-West, range requests
2011-03-08

 [1] 5m12.465s
 [2] 0m31.590s          (remount, then immediately run)
 [2] 25m48.819s         (data cache flushed, inodes still cached in memory)
 [2]                    (proxy entirely restarted: no data cached)