Doubt about programs for testing Linux performance

Linux and Unix-Like Linux
1

Hello friends,

I'm working on a Thesis and right now I'm in a phase of comparing a Linux vs Windows performance in similar situations on the same machine.

I'm asking here because I would like help on this, since I've always worked in Linux as an Administrator and a user, never as a performance tester and I don't know too much about programs to measure it.

My Linux computer will be a LAMP server using Gnome as graphical interface and I'll test performance on it.
My windows might be a w server 200x, but that doesn't concern us here.

I don't know much about testing tools and performance tests, but I'm considering this:
Speed to write a big file on disk
Speed of creating high volume of small files on disk
recovery after failure (no idea how to do this test)
stability and reliability.

well, I'd like to know if anyone could help me proposing more tests I could do.
Besides, I'd like to know of a good performance testing program you'd recomend me, I googled a bit and found this webpage

Open source performance testing tools

full of test tools, but if anyone has experience with one or knows another one that might work for me, I'll gladly hear their advice.

Thanks in advance for your time, I hope you can help me with this.

Good Luck =)

2

bonnie++ would be one to consider

3

Ok, yhat one seems good for disk tests, thank you =)
Any others you might kknow or tests you might recomend?

4

jmeter and iozone (iozone also for disks, jmeter for apache)

5

I think one of the biggest mistakes people make when testing is to time the test from start to finish and not pay attention to anything in between. For example, I always use netperf to measure network performance, or dt to measure disk as well as others, BUT I always run collectl in another window to see what's happening to my cpu, disk, network, memory and other subsystems while the test is in process. If you get an bad end-to-end number, and the intermediate numbers are very erratic it just may be a system or network switch is misconfigured. Looking at the elapsed time or average load will never give you a true picture.

In fact, if you run collectl with a monitoring interval of 0.1 seconds or even less which doing disk tests you can actually watch the cache fill as the tests run faster at first.

-mark

6

Oh, Thanks a lot MarkSeger for that information, believe me I'll take it into consideration while testing performance in the machine.
And thanks too mark54g, those 2 programs seem great. =)

I'm glad to get your help friends =) thanks to everyone who tries to help me here :wink:

7

Being sort of performance engineer for the last couple of years, I can tell for sure that there's no free application that will do your work out of the box. It will take some time to write custom code, depending on your level of knowledge in programming languages. Personally I would recommend Perl's module Benchmark - it has suitable interface for such tasks. Certainly, just in case you have perl knowledge, but if you're going to work on it for a long time, it might worth investing in it. Also, another tool you can use is Sysbench, see its documentation for more details.