Benchmarking software can be invaluable when testing new
hardware/software configurations. The Phoronix Test
Suite is a collection of open
source software benchmarks that are fairly easy to use and the results
are presented in a such a way that is easy to understand; even if you
don’t understand the tests that were run. Today I’ll give a brief run
down of how to install the test suite and run the benchmarks.
Phoronix can be used on almost all operating systems. The only
requirement of the Phoronix Test Suite is PHP. For this demonstration I
am using a Fedora 17 virtual machine, however your experience should be
fairly similar on whatever Linux distribution you may be using.
The first thing I needed to do was install a few PHP packages. A quick
call to yum will take care of this for us:\
[root@guest1 ~]# yum -y install php-cli php-xml php-gd
...
Next I downloaded and extracted the software and ran their install.sh
script to install it.\
[root@guest1 phoronix]# mkdir /tmp/phoronix
[root@guest1 phoronix]# cd /tmp/phoronix
[root@guest1 phoronix]#
[root@guest1 phoronix]# wget --quiet --output-document=phoronix-test-suite-4.2.0.tar.gz http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/download.php?file=phoronix-test-suite-4.2.0
[root@guest1 phoronix]#
[root@guest1 phoronix]# tar xf phoronix-test-suite-4.2.0.tar.gz
[root@guest1 phoronix]#
[root@guest1 phoronix]# cd phoronix-test-suite
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]#
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]# ./install-sh
Phoronix Test Suite Installation Completed
Executable File: /usr/bin/phoronix-test-suite
Documentation: /usr/share/doc/phoronix-test-suite/
Phoronix Test Suite Files: /usr/share/phoronix-test-suite/
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]#
Now that the phoronix software is installed you can run any of the
phoronix tests by using the phoronix-test-suite command. You can run
the phoronix-test-suite list-suites command to view what test suites
are available for you to use. Some of the most notable ones are the
disk test suite and the cpu test suites.
NOTE: A license message will appear upon the first run of
phoronix-test-suite and will require you to answer a few questions.
In order to view the actual tests within the test suite the
phoronix-test-suite info command is useful. For example, to see the
tests within the disk test suite you would call
phoronix-test-suite info disk as is done below:\
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]# phoronix-test-suite info disk
Phoronix Test Suite v4.2.0
Disk Test Suite
Run Identifier: pts/disk-1.2.1
Suite Version: 1.2.1
Maintainer: Michael Larabel
Suite Type: Disk
Unique Tests: 13
Suite Description: This test suite is designed to contain real-world disk and file-system tests.
pts/disk-1.2.1
* pts/compress-gzip
* pts/sqlite
* pts/apache
* pts/pgbench
* pts/compilebench
* pts/iozone
* pts/dbench
* pts/fs-mark
* pts/fio
* pts/tiobench
* pts/postmark
* pts/aio-stress
* pts/unpack-linux
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]#
So how do you run these tests? I like to run my tests in batch mode so
that no questions are asked to me during the test execution. To set this
up run the phoronix-test-suite batch-setup command in order to answer
a few questions that will apply to all of the future batch runs. The
answers that I chose are shown in the output below:\
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]# phoronix-test-suite batch-setup
These are the default configuration options for when running the Phoronix Test Suite in a batch mode (i.e. running phoronix-test-suite batch-benchmark universe). Running in a batch mode is designed to be as autonomous as possible, except for where you'd like any end-user interaction.
Save test results when in batch mode (Y/n): Y
Open the web browser automatically when in batch mode (y/N): N
Auto upload the results to OpenBenchmarking.org (Y/n): n
Prompt for test identifier (Y/n): n
Prompt for test description (Y/n): n
Prompt for saved results file-name (Y/n): n
Run all test options (Y/n): Y
Batch settings saved.
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]#
Now that we have batch set up we can run a few tests using the
phoronix-test-suite batch-benchmark command. I chose to run the
pts/iozone and pts/compress-7zip benchmarks.\
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]# phoronix-test-suite batch-benchmark pts/iozone pts/compress-7zip
...
NOTE: You can see the full output here.
It should take quite some time for the tests to run. After the tests are
complete the results are stored in the
~/.phoronix-test-suite/test-results/ directory. For example, from my
test run all files were stored in
~/.phoronix-test-suite/test-results/2012-12-30-1234/. The best way I
have found to view the test results is to fire up a web browser and
point it to the index.html file within the test results directory:\
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]# firefox ~/.phoronix-test-suite/test-results/2012-12-30-1234/index.html
An example of the test results output for the test I ran can be found
here
The test results for a single test run are nice, but the graphs really
help when comparing runs from multiple tests. i.e you tweak some setting
and then run the benchmarks again to see the performance impact. I
performed two runs of the compress-7zip benchmark to do just this. The
two test runs were placed into the 2012-12-30-2102 and
2012-12-30-2106 directories within the test-results directory. In
order to compare the outputs side by side the
phoronix-test-suite merge-results command is used.
\
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]# phoronix-test-suite merge-results 2012-12-30-2102 2012-12-30-2106
Merged Results Saved To:
/root/.phoronix-test-suite/test-results/merge-1844/composite.xml
Do you want to view the results in your web browser (y/N): N
[root@guest1 phoronix-test-suite]#
For these test runs I didn’t tweak any settings on the system so they
are pretty much the same result, but take a look at the merged test
results here to get an idea
of what I mean about the side-by-side comparison.
Take an opportunity to check out the phoronix
documentation or the
phoronix-test-suite man page to discover more features!
Happy Benchmarking!
Dusty Mabe