These are some benchmarks I have collected over the Net. A few are Linux-specific, others are portable across a wide range of Unix-compatible systems, and some are even more generic.
- UnixBench. A fundamental high-level Linux benchmark suite, Unixbench integrates CPU and file I/O tests, as well as system behaviour under various user loads. Originally written by staff members at BYTE magazine, it has been heavily modified and improved by David C. Niemi, who now maintains this benchmark suite.
- BYTEmark as modified by Uwe Mayer (distributed as
nbench-byte 2.1). A CPU benchmark suite, reporting CPU/cache/memory , integer and floating-point performance. Again, this test originated at BYTE magazine. Uwe did the port to Linux, and recently debugged and improved the calibration and reporting parts of the test. As far as I know nbench-byte presently has the most sophisticated calibration mechanism of any commercial or GPLed benchmark.
- Xengine by Kazuhiko Shutoh. This is a cute little X window tool/toy that basically reports on the speed with which a system will redraw a coloured bitmap on screen (a simulation of a four cycle engine). I like it because it is unpretentious while at the same time providing a useful measure of X server performance. It will also run at any resolution and pixel depth.
- Whetstone. A floating point benchmark by Harold Curnow (see the previous article).
- Xbench by Claus Gittinger. Xbench generates the famous xstone rating for Xserver performance comparisons.
- XMark93. Like xbench, this is a script that uses X11's x11perf and computes an index (in Xmarks). It was written a few years later than xbench and IMHO provides a better metric for X server performance.
- Webstone 2.01. An excellent tool for Web server performance testing. Although Webstone is copyrighted by Silicon Graphics, its license allows free copying and examination of the source code.
- Stream by John D. McCalpin. This program is based on the concept of "machine balance" (sustainable memory bandwidth vs. FPU performance). This has been found to be a central bottleneck for different advanced computer designs in scientific applications.
- Cachebench by Philip J. Mucci. By plotting memory access bandwidth vs. data size, this program will provide a wealth of benchmarking data on the memory subsystem (L1, L2 and main memory).
- Bonnie by Tim Bray. A high-level synthetic benchmark, bonnie is useful for file I/O throughput benchmarking.
- Iozone by Bill Norcott. Measures sequential file I/O throughput. The new 2.01 version supports raw devices and CD-ROM drives.
- Netperf is copyrighted by Hewlett-Packard. This is a sophisticated tool for network performance analysis. Compared to ttcp and ping, it verges on overkill. Source code is freely available.
- Ttcp. A "classic" tool for network performance measurements, ttcp will measure the point-to-point bandwidth (or throughput) over a network connection.
- Ping. Another ubiquitous tool for network performance measurements, ping will measure the latency (or response time) of a network connection.
- Perlbench by David Niemi. A small, portable benchmark written entirely in Perl. Perlbench can be used as an application benchmark.
- Hdparm by Mark Lord. Hdparm's -t and -T options can be used to measure disk-to-memory (disk reads) transfer rates. Hdparm allows setting various EIDE disk parameters and is very useful for EIDE driver tuning. Some commands can also be used with SCSI disks.
- Dga with b option. This is a small demo program for XFree86's DGA extension, and I would never have looked at it were it not for Koen Gadeyne, who added the 'b' command to dga. This command runs a small test of CPU/video memory bandwidth.
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MDBNCH. This is a large ANSI-standard FORTRAN 77 program used as an application benchmark, written by Furio Ercolessi. It accesses a large data set in a very irregular pattern, generating misses in both the L1 and L2 caches. This makes it representative of a special class of programs that present a real challenge to CPU/memory subsystem designers. Furio's Web site has a listing of test results for different machines.
- Doom :-) Doom has a demo mode activated by running
doom -timedemo demo3. Anton Ertl has setup a Web page listing results for various architectures/OS's.
All the benchmarks listed above are available by ftp or http from the
Linux Benchmarking Project server in the download directory: www.tux.org/pub/bench or from the Links page.