I am investigating some locking scheme using semaphores. To evaluate basic system speed I run a loop of getting some semaphore info and display it:

while : ; do ./semshow; done > res.txt

I ran this on 3 boxes - two similar modern HP XEON boxes, one running SCO OpenServer 5, the other is Fedora 2.6.9, and one old PIII box under modern Linux (have no info).
The results are very counter intuitive:
H/W | OS | avg number of runs ber sec
---- | --- | -------------------------
XEON | SCO | 1700
XEON | Fedora | 500
PIII | Linux (recent distro, unknown) | 900
All three systems were pretty much idle at the test run time.

I would like to ask, what would be the factors that makes ancient Unix to outperform modern OSes, also, how come PIII box outperform modern XEON box under similar OS. Any ponters would be appreciated.

The semshow program is very basic, see listing below:

 
#include <stdio.h>
#include <sys/types.h>
#include <sys/ipc.h>
#include <sys/sem.h>
#include  <sys/timeb.h>
#include <time.h>
#include "semlib.h"
#define MODE_CREATE     0
#define MODE_REMOVE     1
key_t   IPCKEY;
main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  int   sid, i;
  pid_t last_rpid, last_wpid;
  char  dbuf[80];
  union semun           arg;
  unsigned short        vals[NSEMS];
  struct timeb tb;
  struct tm *tp;
        if((IPCKEY = get_ipc_key()) == -1)
        {
                errexit("Can Not Obtain IPC Key");
        }
        if((sid = semget(IPCKEY, NSEMS, 0)) == -1)
        {
                errexit("Can Not Get Semaphore ID");
        }
        memset(vals, 0, sizeof(vals));
        arg.array = &vals[0];
        if(semctl(sid, NSEMS, GETALL, arg) == -1)
        {
                errexit("Can Not Get Semaphore Values");
        }
        if((last_rpid = semctl(sid, RDLOCK, GETPID)) == -1)
        {
                errexit("Can Not Get Semaphore R-Pid");
        }
        if((last_wpid = semctl(sid, WRLOCK, GETPID)) == -1)
        {
                errexit("Can Not Get Semaphore W-Pid");
        }
        ftime(&tb);
        tp = localtime(&tb.time);
        strftime(dbuf, sizeof(dbuf) - 1, "%T", tp);
        printf("%12li.%03i %s  RD:[%i]  WR:[%i] %i/%i\n",
                tb.time, tb.millitm, dbuf, 
                vals[RDLOCK], vals[WRLOCK],
                last_rpid, last_wpid);
        exit(0);
}

 
#define NSEMS   2
#define RDLOCK  0
#define WRLOCK  1
union   semun   {
        int             val;
        struct semid_ds *buf;
        unsigned short  *array;
};