Tuesday, December 6, 2011
10:00 PM

Utilities to benchmark UNIX systems - Lmbench

Lmbench is a suite of simple, portable, ANSI/C microbenchmarks for UNIX/POSIX. In general, it measures two key features: latency and bandwidth. lmbench is intended to give system developers insight into basic costs of key operations.

There are two attributes that are critical for performance - latency and bandwidth,  and  lmbench  timing harness makes it easy to measure and report results for both.  Latency is usually important  for  frequently executed  operations,  and  bandwidth  is usually important when moving large chunks of data.

Bandwidth benchmarks
 * Cached file read
 * Memory copy (bcopy)
 * Memory read
 * Memory write
 * Pipe
 * TCP

Latency benchmarks
 * Context switching.
 * Networking: connection establishment, pipe, TCP, UDP, and RPC hot potato
 * File system creates and deletes.
 * Process creation.
 * Signal handling
 * System call overhead
 * Memory read latency

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