Linux Benchmark Suite Homepage

Mission

To provide a wide range of both synthetic and application benchmarks for Linux as well as information and tools to tune and run them.

Introduction

This project is made up of various parties interested in measuring aspects of linux performance. Some members are interested in performance of a specific workload on normal PC architectures, some are comparing specific hardware capabilities,some are trying to push linux's scalibility limits on larger systems, and some are trying to measure performance of specific applications.

One of the problems with benchmarking on linux is the ability to talk about benchmark numbers in the open as certain benchmarks have specific restrictions on their use, usually requiring the results to be audited and approved. We hope to develop open benchmarks to use in substitution of restricted benchmarks.

Project Resources

Project management tools and mailing lists can be found on the SourceForge site.

Benchmark Tools

Quick-Hit Benchmarks

"Quick-hit" benchmarks are simple tests to measure a certain aspect of performance, but usually do not give a larger perceptive of system performance.

Ttcp - measures the point-to-point bandwidth over a network connection

- measures the point-to-point bandwidth over a network connection Ping - can measure the latency of a network connection

- can measure the latency of a network connection Hdparm - "-t" and "-T" options can be used to measure disk-to-memory (disk reads) transfer rates

- "-t" and "-T" options can be used to measure disk-to-memory (disk reads) transfer rates Dga - the "-b" option measures CPU/video memory bandwidth

Synthetic Benchmarks

Synthetic benchmarks are similar to "quick-hit" tests in that they are not meant to represent a "real-world" workload, but can often be useful in measuring the maximum capacity of specific aspects of a system.

lmbench - a GPL'd suite of atomic benchmarks, no publishing restrictions

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

AIM9 - the AIM Independent Resource Benchmark exercises and times each component of a UNIX computer system, independently. The benchmark uses 58 subtests to generate absolute processing rates, in operations per second, for subsystems, I/O transfers, function calls, and UNIX system calls. GPL'd and can be published under the "non-audited" clause.





Netperf - a sophisticated network and filesystem benchmark, freely available, publishable?

SSLperf - open source web benchmark designed to measure performance of SSL operations

dbench - similar workload to netbench but GPL'd and much easier to config and run (doesn't require clients), suite also includes tbench and smbtorture, no publishing restrictions

Bonnie - io throughput benchmark, GPL'd with no publishing restrictions

Bonnie++ an enhanced version of bonnie written in C++, GPL'd with no publishing restrictions

Iozone is useful for performing a broad filesystem analysis of a vendor's computer platform. The benchmark tests file I/O performance for the following operations: Read, write, re-read, re-write, read backwards, read strided, fread, fwrite, random read, pread ,mmap, aio_read, aio_write. It has recently added tests for NFS, CIFS, and distributed/cluster systems.





SPEC CPU2000 - benchmark suite designed to evaluate raw cpu and compiler power

BYTEmark - CPU benchmark suite, reporting CPU/cache/memory, integer and floating-point performance

Cachebench - measures bandwidth of the memory subsystem (L1, L2 and main memory)

Stream - measures sustainable memory bandwidth vs. FPU performance





SPECviewperf - synthetic graphics benchmark

Xengine - a little X window toy that shows the speed with which a system will redraw a coloured bitmap on screen (a simulation of a four cycle engine), availible from www.tux.org/pub/benchmarks/

- a little X window toy that shows the speed with which a system will redraw a coloured bitmap on screen (a simulation of a four cycle engine), availible from www.tux.org/pub/benchmarks/ Xbench Xserver benchmark

XMark93 - Xserver benchmark (part of SPEC, defunct?)

Application Benchmarks

Findings and Whitepapers

Other useful resources