Switched On Tech Design

Tag: benchmarks

  • Ubuntu Server Benchmarks: Phoronix Test Suite

     

    The Phoronix Test Suite is another option when it comes to benchmarking your Ubuntu Server – this one doesn’t work out-of-the-box and requires you to choose the types of benchmarks you wish to run and install them either individually or as suites of benchmarks. You can download it at the following link currently:

     

    wget http://phoronix-test-suite.com/releases/repo/pts.debian/files/phoronix-test-suite_4.4.1_all.deb

     

    Then:

     

    chmod +x phoronix-test-suite_4.4.1_all.deb

     

    Install like so:

     

    dpkg -i phoronix-test-suite_4.4.1_all.deb

     

    You can run it for the first time with the following:

     

    phoronix-test-suite

     

    You will be shown a page of the package’s terms and conditions and prompted to accept them. To see a list of available benchmarks, run:

     

    phoronix-test-suite list-tests

     

    If you wanted to install the blake2 benchmark as an example, you would run:

     

    phoronix-test-suite install blake2

     

    This will install the blake2 test and try to address any unmet dependencies (e.g. install packages which that benchmark requires to run that aren’t already installed). To run an installed test, issue the following command (using blake2 as an example again):

     

    phoronix-test-suite benchmark blake2

     

    If you are interested in running a suite of tests (or just want to run a few tests without having to individually install the lot of them) you can list whole suites of tests at once with:

     

    phoronix-test-suite list-available-suites

     

    The install process is the same as for an individual test:

     

    phoronix-test-suite install [suitename]

     

    If you’re looking to measure a specific metric there’s plenty to choose from here – there’s a lengthy list of available tests and suites. As an example of results, here’s the chess benchmark:

     

    ubuntuBenchmark-phoronix-chess

  • Ubuntu Server Benchmarks: Hardinfo

     

    Hardinfo is one of the command-line benchmarks available for Ubuntu Server – it does have graphical features so it will also be useful for Ubuntu Desktop users, but for the purpose of this piece we will assume you’re at a terminal. It not only runs benchmarks like Blowfish but also shows you a great deal of information about the system itself, like ARP tables, sensors, CPU/RAM details and more.

     

    To install, run the following:

     

    sudo apt-get install hardinfo

     

    You can run it without using less to view the results, but you’ll probably want to pipe the results to less to make it a bit easier to navigate the pages of text. Run it with the following:

     

    hardinfo | less

     

    This pipes the output to the “less” command – once the command completes you will be able to navigate the results with the up/down and pageup/pagedown keys. To quit less press “q”. At the bottom of the results are the benchmarks; they will look something akin to this:

     

    ubuntuBenchmark-hardinfo

     

    The benchmark in this case was run on an ESXi VM with two 2.3GHz CPUs. It’s not the prettiest output but it provides quite a bit of potentially useful information. The output from hardinfo is a whole lot prettier when you have a GUI!

  • Intel SSD 330 120GB benchmarks

     

     

    As promised, here are some benchmarks of Intel’s SSD:

    An average of 390MB/s for sequential reads? Nice. IOPS:

    HD Tune Pro’s File Transfer test:

    Hovering around 500MB/s there – impressive. Last benchmark for now:

    Overall this is a well performing drive and is the only Sandforce-controller-based drive that we currently use.