Benchmark performance test. Server performance measurement options

Benchmark performance test (eng. Benchmark ) - a control task necessary to determine the comparative characteristics of the performance of a computer system. Sometimes benchmarks are also programs that test the battery life of laptops and PDAs, the range of the wireless network, the bandwidth of data transmission channels, the amplitude-frequency response of the audio path, and other characteristics that are not directly related to performance.

Benchmarks are used to compare the performance of computers and are often a criterion for selecting a component of a particular manufacturer. In addition, the successful completion of a series of tests is evidence of the stability of the system in normal and overclocked modes.

Popular benchmarks

Screenshot from the test program CineBench 2003

The number of benchmarks is growing every day. Nevertheless, only a few dozen of them are generally recognized, and the performance ratings of those or other computer components are often based on the results of which.

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  Computer games as a benchmarkLavaLys Everest - testing subsystems ALU and FPU processor, cache, memory bandwidth, speed of the hard disk
• 3DMark is a test used to determine computer performance in 3D gaming graphics.
• PCMark - integral test of all computer subsystems
• Java Micro Benchmark - a Java test used to determine computer performance
• Unigine Heaven 2 - a test used to determine computer performance in three-dimensional gaming graphics in DirectX 9, 10, 10.1, 11 and OpenGL modes
• 3D Orc FPS is a test used to determine computer performance in 3D gaming graphics (XP, Windows 7, Windows 8).
• Aquamark is a test used to determine computer performance in three-dimensional gaming graphics.
• BAPCO - integral tests of computer performance in office applications (SysMark), while creating Internet content (WebMark), battery life of portable PCs (MobileMark)
• Right Mark Memory Analyzer - test cache and memory subsystems
• Right Mark Audio Analyzer - testing the quality of analog and digital paths of sound equipment
• CineBench - computer testing in the mode of creating three-dimensional graphics
• ScienceMark - test of ALU and FPU subsystems of the processor, cache, memory bandwidth
• SiSoft Sandra - contains testing modules for many computer subsystems
• SuperPI - a test that calculates Pi number with a specified number of decimal places
• Business Winstone - integral test of computer performance in office applications

Many computer games, due to their demands for hardware and the dependence of the speed of the game on the power of computers, are successfully used as benchmarks. Typically, the benchmarking of a computer in a game is as follows: a pre-recorded test demo is launched and the number of frames per second (FPS) is measured, which the system under test is capable of issuing. Test results in different resolutions and with different quality settings are entered into a table.

Daily computer tasks as a benchmark

With great success, various tasks that are performed daily by users on a computer can be used to compare performance, for example:

• Application of digital filters in graphic editors
• Compress files using archivers
• Audio and video encoding
• Rendering scenes in 3D editors

Measuring the execution time of the same operation on the same source files, but on different computers, you can get a comparative performance characteristic.

Benchmarking as a sport

Recently, benchmarking, that is, competition in the performance of computers in special tests, has become a special kind of virtual sport. Benchmarking was widely adopted after the appearance of the test results system FutureMark Online Result Browser. The main test with which overclockers and just owners of powerful computers compete with each other is FutureMark 3DMark. In second place in popularity in the so-called. Benchers worth the test Aquamark. The personalities (or network nicknames) of the authors of the most impressive records in these tests become relatively famous in the circle of the same benchers (benchmarkers).

Benchmarking as a kind of virtual sport has the same features as eSports: dividing into interest groups (owners of a video card, processor, etc.) and cheating (deception of the results recording system).

Testing the performance of WEB servers

Test phoronix-test-suite. This is a set of modern tests that allow to evaluate the system performance by several parameters:

• C-Ray is a simple ray tracing designed for testing processor floating point calculations. This test is multi-threaded (16 threads per core), 8 beams per pixel are released with anti-aliasing, as a result an image of 1600x1200 pixels is generated.
• Apache BenchmarkSystem - this test shows how many requests per second the system can withstand by executing 700,000 requests with 100 requests at a time.
• RAM Stream - a test to determine the performance of RAM.

Iozone hard drive test. The result of this test is data on the speed of writing, rewriting and reading files of various sizes with different block sizes.

Usually they calculate the average value of the speed of writing, reading, random writing and random reading of a file of 8 Gb size with a block size of 1 Mb. According to the data obtained, it is easy to compare the performance of the disks of the studied servers.