Is there a benchmark tools for Ubuntu?

Question

Is there a benchmarker (a tool to measure computer performance) for Ubuntu (like SuperPI, 3DMark, or PCMark)?

Answer 1

There look to be a number of them listed in the Ubuntu Software Center (search "benchmark"), although the only one I've tried is System Profiler and Benchmark. It gives a lot of computer information and I've found it very useful, but you might want to try out a number of them.

Answer 2

The most complete benchmarking software is probably Phoronix test suite, which is available in the repositories and can be installed with:

sudo apt-get install phoronix-test-suite

When running phoronix-test-suite for the first time in terminal, you can either answer yes or no to the questions regarding anonymous statistical reporting. If you answer yes, it says that

This information is pooled along with the submissions from all other users to show general trends and other details on OpenBenchmarking.org.

It is up to you whether you choose yes or no, but there is nothing to be concerned with. You can still later upload results manually to openbenchmarking if you wish with the options in the program:

phoronix-test-suite upload-result <your test-result>

For more information about Phoronix test suite see this pdf and the official forum.

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To list all the tests available (but not necessarily downloaded), run:

phoronix-test-suite list-tests

which gives tests such as these and many others:

pts/aio-stress               - AIO-Stress                          Disk     
pts/apache                   - Apache Benchmark                    System   
pts/apitrace                 - APITrace                            Graphics 
pts/battery-power-usage      - Battery Power Usage                 System   
pts/blogbench                - BlogBench                           Disk    

To find information on any particular test, you can use:

phoronix-test-suite info povray

Many of the tests are not installed by default and you can either download an individual test and run it with, for example:

phoronix-test-suite install povray
phoronix-test-suite run povray

To find the lists of thematic test suites, run

phoronix-test-suite list-suites 

which returns such things as

pts/audio-encoding               - Audio Encoding                   System
pts/chess                        - Chess Test Suite                 Processor
pts/compilation                  - Timed Code Compilation           Processor
pts/compiler                     - Compiler                         Processor
pts/compression                  - Timed File Compression           Processor

As an example, you might want to run the entire suite of audio tests (instead of just one from those listed with the list-tests command), so, in this circumstance, enter

phoronix-test-suite run audio-encoding

For this test, some more of the related audio tests are downloaded and installed by the program and then the test is run.

There are a huge amount of tests to install and options to experiment with, but this test suite is definitely the one to use if you want to get some genuine benchmarks from your Ubuntu system that you can compare online at openbenchmarking and Phoronix.com.

It is not a quick, simple benchmarking application, but one that, with its multiple tests, will satisfy most areas of interest in regard to how things perform on Ubuntu.

However, benchmarking is a topic much debated and the forums are best suited for analysing which tests give the most useful results and how the tests should be setup; the one mentioned above, povray, is quite well known and regarded for benchmarking the abilities of a CPU.