Angelo’s blog

At work, we have some workstations varying in age between 4 years and 4 months. But when is a workstation written off? We have the default policy of writing a PC off after 3 years, but what if the PC is still working like a charm?

 To have some extra numbers to take into consideration, I wanted to create a speed rating that would define the performance of a PC in a single number. I searched for quite some time to find a decent benchmark that would run on any PC (or server), and eventually, I cooked something up.

I downloaded the knoppix cd to boot from in text mode (type ‘knoppix 2′ at the boot screen) on each PC, download the script below, and run it.

It downloads and compiles ubench and seeker. Ubench is a tool that does some mathematical calculations, and benchmarks the CPU and memory. I then use hdparm to get the maximum sequential read in MB/s, then I run seeker to get the number of seeks per second, and the average access time in milliseconds. I run all these tests 3 times, to make sure one isn’t off.

I enter all data in an Excel sheet, and create a rating for the disk, by averaging the 3 disk numbers (using the PERCENTRANK function to place them on a scale from very bad to very good). I then create a average between the scaled CPU/Mem rating (60% weighed) and disk rating (40% weighed) to create a final ranking score on a scale from 0 to 100. Still have to find out the exact weights though, but the rating gives a global idea of the system’s performance.

# angelo@hongens.nl 2007/5/14
#SET VARIABLE TO CORRECT DISK!
DISK=/dev/sda

#download and compile ubench
cd ~
wget http://www.phystech.com/ftp/ubench-0.32.tar.gz
tar xzf ubench-0.32.tar.gz
cd ~/ubench-0.32
./configure
make

#download and compile seeker
wget -O ~/seeker.c http://www.linuxinsight.com/files/seeker.c.txt
gcc -O2 ~/seeker.c -o ~/seeker
rm ~/seeker.c

~/ubench-0.32/ubench
hdparm -t $DISK
~/seeker $DISK

~/ubench-0.32/ubench
hdparm -t $DISK
~/seeker $DISK

~/ubench-0.32/ubench
hdparm -t $DISK
~/seeker $DISK