CPU benchmarking

Phoronix supports a set of CPU tests in a test suite called CPU. This test suite covers multiple CPU-intensive tasks, which are mentioned at the following URL: https://openbenchmarking.org/suite/pts/CPU.

If you want to run this CPU test suite, then you need to execute the Phoronix Test Suite benchmark CPU command as a root user. We can also run a specific test by mentioning its test name. For example, let's run a sample CPU benchmarking test as follows:

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark pts/himeno 
Phoronix Test Suite v6.8.0 
    To Install: pts/himeno-1.2.0 
    ... 
    1 Test To Install 
    pts/himeno-1.2.0: 
        Test Installation 1 of 1 
        1 File Needed 
        Downloading: himenobmtxpa.tar.bz2 
 Started Run 2 @ 05:53:40 
 Started Run 3 @ 05:54:35  [Std. Dev: 1.66%] 
Test Results: 
 1503.636072
 1512.166077
 1550.985494
Average: 1522.26 MFLOPS

Phoronix also provides a way to observe the detailed test results via HTML file. Also, it supports the offline generation of PDF, JSON, CSV, and text format outputs. To open these test results in the browser, we need to execute the following command:

$ phoronix-test-suite show-result <Test Name>

The following is a sample screenshot of the results of the preceding command:

The sysbench tool provides a CPU task, which calculates the number of prime numbers within a given range and provides the CPU-elapsed time. Let's execute the sysbench command as shown in the following screenshot, to retrieve the CPU measurements:

[root@localhost ~]# sysbench --test=CPU --CPU-max-prime=10000 --num-threads=4 run
Doing CPU performance benchmark
Threads started!
Done.
Maximum prime number checked in CPU test: 10000
Test execution summary:


        total time:                          3.2531s
      

    total number of events:              10000
    total time taken by event execution: 13.0040
    per-request statistics:
         min:                                  1.10ms
         avg:                                  1.30ms
         max:                                  8.60ms
         approx.  95 percentile:               1.43ms
Threads fairness:


        events (avg/stddev):           2500.0000/8.46
      

    execution time (avg/stddev):   3.2510/0.00

The URL http://openbenchmarking.org/ provides a detailed description of each test detail along with its implementation, and would encourage you to read more information about the himeno test case.

From the previous results, the system takes 3.2531 seconds to compute the 10,000 prime numbers, with the help of four background threads.