On 14 December 2006 15:03, Bruno Santos wrote: > Hello all. > > I need to perform some benchmarks with the Kernel and with the distro > itself but i cannot find any satisfactory app for that.
... and you probably won't. The question is: How do you benchmark a whole system? If you have some some number crunching application, it is relatively easy to benchmark that particular app. Feed it a certain data set and measure the CPU time it takes to finish. Repeat several times and calculate an average for trashed and non-trashed memory. Do the same on different systems and compare. Same for anything that simply runs, once started, until it has finished - like a compiler run on a set of sources. A whole system, even if it is commandline-only, is a different kettle of fish. What do you measure? Start-up times of applications under different circumstances (low, medium, high system load), that's possible again. Once the (interactive) application - say vim - runs, it will wait for your next keystroke at full CPU speed anyway. It becomes even more difficult with a GUI since they are all driven by user events. And yet, you are still benchmarking applications. The question remains: What *is* the performance of a whole system? As for the kernel, you can measure certain of its aspects. How fast is a fork? How fast are the various methods of IPC (sockets, pipes, shared memory,...)? How good is IO (system bus, harddisk, network,...) throughput? How fast are certain system calls? And so on, and so on. So you can test certain kernel functions. Like with a whole system, what is the performance of a kernel? I don't have any good answer for either question, kernel and system. :-( Uwe -- Mark Twain: I rather decline two drinks than a German adjective. http://www.SysEx.com.na -- gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list
