Benchmark linux box

What's the best tool to benchmark a linux machine? I'm comparing machines from two different cloud providers. It needs to be a command line tool. Just need to benchmark CPU and I/O performance.

Solution 1:

Benchmarking CPU and I/O in isolation is pointless. Benchmark your exact workload.

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:

You can measure the disk performance with "hdparm" if you know the name of the device.

For the CPU the best bet is to consider a prototype of the program you actually want to run there, as the provider may have CPU throtteling depending on the amount of CPU used.