73

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

1

5 Answers 5

59

The most complete benchmarking software is probably Phoronix test suite.

Tested on Ubuntu 23.10, it can be obtained from https://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/?k=downloads with:

sudo apt-get install php-cli php-xml
wget https://phoronix-test-suite.com/releases/phoronix-test-suite-10.8.4.tar.gz
tar xfz phoronix-test-suite-10.8.4.tar.gz
export PATH="$PATH:$(pwd)/phoronix-test-suite"

Up to Ubuntu 18.04 there was a package for it available in the repositories which could be installed with:

sudo apt-get install phoronix-test-suite

but the package is now gone.

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.


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.

6
  • 4
    Has anyone actually independently audited the validity of the tests in this test suite? Some of the results reported on Phoronix are from poorly configured tests from what I've seen. Oct 20, 2012 at 20:13
  • @ColinIanKing See my edit regarding the debate on benchmarking.
    – user76204
    Oct 21, 2012 at 12:38
  • 2
    It looked promising, when I launched the first test (povray) and he started to install apparently all necessary packages. But then povray installation failed because of missing autoconf, leaving povray installation to some unrecoverable broken stage (I mean, it would not work even after installing autoconf). I restarted from a backup, installed autoconf, and dropped in the same situation because of missing libtiff-dev. So I gave up.
    – Antonio
    Mar 11, 2015 at 8:41
  • 1
    It appears that it hasn't been updated in Ubuntu since xenial (v 5.2), and it's been removed from Debian. Their webpage shows v8.2 and v8.4 though, so installing from apt might not be the best idea anymore
    – Xen2050
    Oct 21, 2018 at 12:37
  • 5
    E: Unable to locate package phoronix-test-suite Feb 3, 2022 at 22:45
30

Install hardinfo which gives benchmark information as shown below screen-shot:

sudo apt-get install hardinfo

enter image description here

3
  • 10
    What kind of dinosaur age PC are you using ? My AMD A8-4500M laptop which is not so new gets 4.83 seconds
    – Suici Doga
    Jul 16, 2016 at 1:34
  • 1
    Tried updating that tests database and the message was "can not connect to server" Jan 13, 2017 at 17:26
  • 1
    those results (comparative app database) are very very old May 25, 2019 at 22:07
13

I eventually got around to writing a stress test and benchmarking tool for UNIX like systems, namely stress-ng. It contains over 180 stress tests that allow one to measure throughput on various system components, from memory, cache, CPU, system calls, network, etc. Install with:

sudo apt-get install stress-ng

There is a --metrics-brief option that reports the throughput in terms of bogo ops per second. One can get a full set of deep CPU and system metrics using the --perf option. There are many types of stressors that can be run sequentially or in parallel on 1 or more CPUs, for example:

stress-ng --metrics-brief --cpu 2 -t 1m

this will exercise the CPU for 1 minute with 2 CPU stressor instances running in parallel.

The manual documents all these features in detail, consult the project page or the quick start reference guide

12

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.

7

Another option is sysbench. It is a command line tool with built in tests for CPU, memory, file, threading and database. There is an article about it here. Install is a single package, and running tests is quick.

Likely the quality of results is lower than more sophisticated tests, but I found it useful for a quick sanity check when evaluating potential VPS hosting.

Based on the popular answer by user76204, I did try Phoronix test suite. As the author says, it is not quick or simple. There are 100s of tests available and it's not obvious which to use. Some require 100s of MB of downloads, some take an hour or more to run, some may not run on your server. On Ubuntu, I hit a bug described here.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .