Linux benchmarking tools

Question

I've been asked to evaluate a new vendor's computing system and management has requested that I do NOT use any of our existing software to evaluate the platform (believe it or not, they have some valid reasons).

Anyways, I've started trying to read up on meaningful benchmark programs for server-grade computers but haven't been all that impressed. I'm trying to demonstrate raw computing power and memory I/O throughput.

Any suggestions on meaningful tests that I should run? -- I will have access to both the existing system and the system to evaluate for all of these tests.

Answer 1

A lot of linux "benchmarks" ive seen demonstrate things such as encoding with LAME. I dont know if that example holds any water for a "server-grade" test

Answer 2

Phoronix has a benchmark suite for Linux. Maybe it is sufficent for you.

Answer 3

Have a look at the Transaction Processing Council for ideas. They may have a result for your machines already.

Unfortunately you need to be a member to get hold of the software which is proced up to tier 1 hardware vendor levels.

Answer 4

I ended up using the following sites to arrive at some somewhat meaningful benchmarks:

• Linux Benchmarking HOWTO
• SPEC (as suggested by matli)
• Linux Benchmark Suite Homepage
• LMBench
• SELinux Benchmarks

Answer 5

It's not FLOSS, but http://www.primatelabs.ca/geekbench/ is pretty good :)

Answer 6

SPEC is a fairly standardized and well recognized set of benchmarks. They are not free, but not very expensive. There are also a lot of published benchmark results for various servers on their web site.