Linux-Bench November 2014 Update

November 2014 will be a major step for Linux-Bench. Today, Anandtech published their first piece with Linux-Bench results. We are working on an updated version of the parser. A few new benchmarks are coming! There is plenty of exciting news so before the holiday season is upon us, we wanted to give an update for the project.

Anandtech joins Tom’s Hardware and STH as review sites now using Linux-Bench. Dr. Ian Cutress used the benchmarks to investigate single v. dual channel operation in a Lenovo workstation. Further, Anandtech’s “Bench” benchmark comparison tool now includes Linux-Bench results.  The Linux-Bench site (per the next item in this update) will have a similar functionality in the near future across multiple benchmarks. Dr. Cutress did the STH and Linux-Bench communities an excellent service by even posting raw run references to the STH forum thread here.

After some (read a lot) of time digging into what the vendor did with the parsing functionality, we counted Bash, Java, C++, Ruby along with both nginx and Apache making the whole thing work. Frankly, that is too complex for such a simple application. As of last evening the whole thing was being re-coded in python along with a few other features. The result of this re-design will also be that the benchmark viewer will (finally) work with the new data set. We will also be introducing a RESTful API model to the site. This will allow direct linking to results instead of the current process of copying and pasting ID numbers, and clicking submit.

Along with the python changeover, another major aspect we are looking to change is the amount of information and the flow of the Linux-Bench.com site. We are going to start by adding descriptions of benchmarks which should be live in the next 24 hours.

On the benchmark side Linux-Bench has always been a CPU focused benchmark suite. The requests have come in a for a storage version and we started a discussion thread and a github repository for the project. On the traditional Linux-Bench CPU side we are going to add a RAM disk specific test. This has been a frequent request so the feature will be added soon.

Finally, a quick ask: go benchmark your systems!  There is a solid list of enhancements in the pipeline and the way we are making Linux-Bench better is by constantly getting feedback. Linux-Bench is the easiest Linux based benchmark suite to run. Here are the simple Linux-Bench instructions to get you started.