I am working on a product which will run on customer's Linux servers. These systems vary in capability greatly and I'd love to have a single benchmarking tool which I could ask them to run to get an indication of the machines CPU, disk write speed etc. Our product is sensitive to CPU, disk write speed etc, so an indication of how capable a machine is really helps set expectations for performance. Several customers are using Cloud providers, and may not be sure of the performance characteristics of their hardware.
I know there are dozens of Linux benchmarking tools, but that's confusing for a support tech or customer to work with, and we're trying to avoid writing (more of) a wrapper tool which aggregates results if there's a growing standardisation on one suite within the community. Also, to be honest, I'm drowning in choice! Highly specific tools are appropriate "under the hood", or within development, but they're not ideal for, eg, sales calls or demos.
I'd like some recommendations for a single benchmark tool that would do for most cases. Something simple that would enable this response would be great: "Ah, that's a decent server, looks like it should be fine, but it does have slower disks than we'd hoped."
What's your favourite Linux server quick benchmark tool?
Best Answer
I usually use UnixBench (WHT Variant) to generate benchmarks across systems.
It's good for giving a single number that can convey relative performance when comparing system setups/configurations.
Outside of that, I obtain hard numbers for things like storage using the standard tools (bonnie++, iozone, etc.)
Also see: How to measure disk throughput?