LWN.net Logo

Testing for kernel performance regressions

Testing for kernel performance regressions

Posted Aug 6, 2012 13:31 UTC (Mon) by cmorgan (guest, #71980)
Parent article: Testing for kernel performance regressions

How about the Phoronix Test suite? http://www.phoronix-test-suite.com/

Phoronix has been doing kernel benchmarking for years now and has pointed out a bunch of kernel releases/distro releases that have performance regressions.

Chris


(Log in to post comments)

Testing for kernel performance regressions

Posted Aug 6, 2012 22:45 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313) [Link]

A large part of the problem is the tests that are part of the suite.

Many of them really don't make sense and some (disk related that I know of) are downright misleading, givng 'better' scores for situations where things are misbehaving.

Many people have tried to point this out and made no progress in getting them changed.

Testing for kernel performance regressions

Posted Aug 6, 2012 23:02 UTC (Mon) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

To be fair, that mostly manifests in cases where some filesystem/device ignores 'sync' calls. That usually results in stunningly better performance.

But most other cases are fine. Phoronix usually captures quite real performance regressions.

Testing for kernel performance regressions

Posted Aug 7, 2012 13:02 UTC (Tue) by cmorgan (guest, #71980) [Link]

The Phoronix test suite is also open source from what the page indicates. Which means that people can provide patches, fork etc.

Just wanted to point out that Phoronix has been a great resource for exactly the kind of benchmarking between kernel releases that the article was referring to, and has been doing so for years.

I wonder if any kernel developers have used the Phoronix results to help target fixes for various regressions.

Copyright © 2013, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds