Simple Linux server benchmark?

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?

Solution 1:

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?

Solution 2:

I also find sysbench pretty useful.

On my cloud machines, I often run:

for i in cpu threads mutex memory; do
        sysbench --test=$i run
done

Note that there are many, many test options, and two more modes that require a bit more setup (fileio and oltp).

I use this to determine the relative speed of various instances I launch with my cloud providers. Not all EC2 instances are created equal ;-)

Solution 3:

Try here:

OpenBenchmarking.org is an open, collaborative testing platform designed by Phoronix Media and the developers behind the Phoronix Test Suite, the most comprehensive benchmarking platform for Linux and other operating systems. OpenBenchmarking.org makes the Phoronix Test Suite an even more extensible platform for conducting automated tests with complete integration into Phoronix Test Suite 3.0-Iveland as well as within Phoromatic, an online test remote management system designed for managing test farms within enterprise environments.

http://openbenchmarking.org/

Solution 4:

Personally I used this a couple of times.

In the future I wanted to try linux benchmark suite since it makes a pretty good impression too. Unfortunately it is no longer under active development, so it might not be the right choice for the future. Since I didnt use it for a big project it worked out for me.

Solution 5:

I usually work with sysbench. Very good and simple tool for CPU, database performance, etc...

http://www.serveradminblog.com/2010/02/sysbench-on-centos-howto/