soerenmetje/linux-benchmarking

Benchmark linux machines regarding compute, memory, storage, and network performance

Linux Benchmarking Framework

This project contains Bash scripts to automate benchmarking linux machines regarding compute, memory, storage, and network performance. The following benchmark tools are used to evaluate particular metrics:

Metric	Benchmark	Version
CPU performance	Sysbench CPU	1.0.20
Memory throughput	Sysbench Memory	1.0.20
Storage throughput	fio (rnd & seq)	3.28
Network throughput	Iperf3	3.9

Overall, this project aims at enabling users to make an informed decision whether certain virtual private servers (VPS) offers are a good deal or not.

Content

• Shell scripts in src/benchmark/ to:
  • perform benchmarks
  • write benchmark results into .csv files
• Python scripts in src/plot/ to:
  • read the result files
  • create plots
• CSV result files in data/
• Log files in logs/
• Plot images in plots/

Benchmarking Results

As an example, the following plot shows the read and write file I/O performance for sequential operations. Here, we evaluated VPS from different providers.

All plots and results are available in RESULTS.md

Prerequisites

This setup has a few prerequisites regarding the local computer (e.g. laptop) that runs the main script and the server that should be evaluated.

Local Computer Prerequisites

To test this project, we used Ubuntu 22.04 on the local computer. In general, it should also work with other Linux distributions.

• bash is installed
• ssh is installed
• python3 is installed
• The Python packages defined in requirements.txt are installed
• Local computer can access the servers via ssh using the key $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa

Server Prerequisites

During testing, we used Ubuntu 22.04 on the servers as well. In general, it should also work with other Linux distributions.

• bash is installed
• jq is installed
• sysbench is installed
• fio is installed
• iperf3 is installed

Getting Started

This repository contains a script main.sh. This script is designed to be executed locally, e.g., on a laptop. It

• connects to the server
• runs the benchmark
• copies the benchmark result file (.csv) as well as log files from the server to the local machine

Following command is an example for evaluating the server 141.5.100.173 using the sysbench-cpu benchmark:

# /bin/bash src/benchmark/main.sh <server-user> <server-ip> <machine> <benchmark>
/bin/bash src/benchmark/main.sh cloud 141.5.100.173 "AWS 4v 8GB" sysbench-cpu

After execution, the benchmark result file can be obtained in data/ and the log files in logs/.

Parameters

For execution, the script main.sh requires multiple parameters in a specific order:

• Server User
• Server IP
• Machine
• Benchmarks

Server User

The first parameter specifies the linux user on the server that should be used in ssh.

Server IP

The second parameter sets the server ip that is used in ssh.

Machine

The third parameter is an arbitrary string that describes the machine under evaluation. Preferably this string is short and descriptive such as AWS 4v 8GB.

Benchmarks

The fourth parameter specifies the benchmark. The available benchmarks can be determined by the file names workload-*.sh inside the workloads directories:

• sysbench-cpu
• sysbench-memory
• fio-diskrnd
• fio-diskseq
• iperf3-bandwidth