Stress testing your machine -- what program?

[Fernando Duran]

Hi,

I was going to joke "Go to Flash web sites with Firefox" but I'll also leave these links: 

http://www.opensourcetesting.org/performance.php
http://linuxpoison.blogspot.com/2008/07/opensource-performance-testing-tools.html
http://lbs.sourceforge.net/
http://www.testingfaqs.org/t-load.html

You can 'benchmark' HD with hdparm, for example  hdparm -Tt /dev/sda , you can also use 'dd' to move bytes around and 'time' it, something like:
dd if=/dev/sda of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1024

I've used this the other way around to create a big file and 'md5sum' it several times, getting different results confirmed bad RAM. 

The problem is that except for HD, the stress results are hard to compare to other systems. 

Also the 'bottleneck' result would be for the particular tested load. For a system with any significant disk I/O, the disk would be the bottleneck, so the upgrade to look for is a SSD drive. The next one up is typically RAM.

For CPU, not a benchmark but when I got a new computer I used to recompile the kernel to see how much faster it would finish, follow by a mild disappointment.

  

---------------------
Fernando Duran
http://www.fduran.com


--- On Sun, 4/17/11, William Park <opengeometry at yahoo.ca> wrote:

> From: William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>
> Subject: [TLUG]: Stress testing your machine -- what program?
> To: tlug at ss.org
> Received: Sunday, April 17, 2011, 9:31 PM
> Hi all,
> 
> On Windows7, there is "Windows Experience Index" under
> "System
> Properties" which does some benchmarking of cpu, memory,
> video, and hd.
> Probably not very accurate, but it does tell you which
> sub-system is
> bottleneck and needs upgrading.
> 
> Is there something similar in Linux, say in KDE or Gnome,
> or even
> standalone program?
> -- 
> William
> --
> The Toronto Linux Users Group.     
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