Benchmarks

A benchmark is everything that gives you an idea about performance. For your Linux, you can use the following benchmarks:

Combined benchmarks

A quick and easy benchmark that combines the performance of all your computer's components is GeekBench.

Component benchmarks

CPU

This tests CPU and memory with a strong focus on addition:

# time (i=0; while (( $i < 10000 )); do i=$i+1; done)

real    0m4.173s
user    0m4.161s
sys     0m0.000s

RAM

Quick and dirty test if your RAM is okay:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/shm/test count=5000 bs=8k
5000+0 records in
5000+0 records out
40960000 bytes (41 MB) copied, 0.0175427 s, 2.3 GB/s

disk

• hdparm
• IOps - random read performance in IOPS and MB/s

file system

• bonnie
• iozone
• iometer

networking

Throughput

Use netcat, for example on the receiver:

netcat -l -p 8000 >/dev/null

and on the sender in the bash:

dd if=test bs=1024K count=512 > /dev/tcp/192.168.0.9/8000 

a result can be:

4887552 bytes (4.9 MB) copied, 4.3689 s, 1.1 MB/s

An interesting thing is that if you forget the >/dev/null you will come to a pretty constant value which is useless because it tells you how quickly the shell can write nulls.

latency

• ping

MTU

Increasing the MTU helps reducing the need for ACK packages and reduces interrupt storm on the processors.

httpd benchmarks

• httping

webserver stressen

httping -f -h servername
httping -g URL

HTTP benchmarking utility

• siege
• ab

Graphic card

Watching a video feels sluggish on one computer, but on the other it is okay ? Test your graphics card with glxgears like this:

$ glxgears
359 frames in 5.1 seconds = 70.397 FPS
320 frames in 5.1 seconds = 62.590 FPS
320 frames in 5.3 seconds = 60.201 FPS
320 frames in 5.1 seconds = 63.046 FPS
300 frames in 5.4 seconds = 55.305 FPS
340 frames in 5.4 seconds = 62.724 FPS
300 frames in 5.2 seconds = 57.543 FPS
340 frames in 5.4 seconds = 62.483 FPS
320 frames in 5.1 seconds = 62.149 FPS
320 frames in 5.2 seconds = 61.365 FPS
300 frames in 5.1 seconds = 59.275 FPS
320 frames in 5.5 seconds = 58.109 FPS
320 frames in 5.1 seconds = 62.149 FPS

See also

• latency
• block sizes