Linux Benchmark Software?

[Tim Seufert]

On Monday, December 30, 2002, at 09:40  AM, William J. Brinkman wrote:

> I like lmbench the best. http://www.bitmover.com/lmbench/
> This gives you meaningful measurements like file creation time, file 
> read
> time, context switch time, etc. Also, it compiles on most *nix's. I 
> found
> my results on OS X in console mode very interesting.

lmbench only tries to measure operating system performance, though.  It 
won't give you any idea how well applications will perform, which is 
probably the kind of benchmark the original poster wanted.  (Unless the 
applications of interest to the OP are the sort which spend almost all 
their time in kernel mode doing the things lmbench does, in which case 
lmbench is a fine benchmark.  :)

P.S.  interesting because the scores are different than OS X in GUI 
mode? or something else?  I've lmbenched OS X before, in GUI mode, and 
the only notable thing was how poor the results were compared to Linux 
on the same hardware.  But that was back before Apple had done much 
performance optimization, I think it's gotten better since then.  
They'll have a hard time matching the Linux lmbench scores since they 
use Mach as part of their kernel; Mach seems to inherently have higher 
latencies etc. than Linux.  But the scores in 10.0.x and 10.1.x were 
really bad, so there was a lot of room for improvement.