Benchmark Linux

So, you think your system’s fast? Faster than Jonni Bidwell’s? Almost certainly. And now you can prove it with our awesome guide to speed testing.

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The different hardware components in your computer all run at given speeds or have easily accessible speed limits. If your  hard drive or SSD is attached to a SATA 3.0 bus then it has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 600MB/s, while a fancy m.2 SSD (connected to a fast enough PCIe slot) will easily manage 2.5GB/s on a good day, and the bus itself (using 4 PCIe 3.0 lanes) can manage 3.9GB/s.

Yes, your CPU will change frequency according to load (likewise your GPU), and yes these things can be overclocked, but all these numbers can be looked up or otherwise calculated. The trouble is, most of the time they don’t correlate with real world performance, since most real world operations use a variety of different aspects of the system. For example, given all the specs of all the hardware involved, it’s still hard to say how quickly a system will boot a vanilla install of the latest Fedora. Likewise what kind of FPS you’ll see if you turn everything up to 11 on Shadow of Mordor. These real world measurements are tricky because they involve all kinds of intangibles – overheads introduced by the filesystem, code paths used by the graphics driver, latencies introduced by scheduling in the kernel. Tricky to predict, but, minus a few caveats, not so tricky to measure.

Benchmarking is the dark art of performing this measurement. It involves running standard programs that can be compared across different machines, each program testing some particular aspect of the system. But nothing’s ever simple and it’s easy to get benchmarking wrong. Background programs, thermal throttling, laptop power-saving and display compositors can all interfere. Games in particular tend to do better on one processor manufacturer or GPU driver. Using a particular title and assuming the results will give a objective ranking is foolhardy.