From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S262787AbTKNRDP (ORCPT ); Fri, 14 Nov 2003 12:03:15 -0500 Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org id S262784AbTKNRDO (ORCPT ); Fri, 14 Nov 2003 12:03:14 -0500 Received: from kinesis.swishmail.com ([209.10.110.86]:48651 "HELO kinesis.swishmail.com") by vger.kernel.org with SMTP id S264585AbTKNRBg (ORCPT ); Fri, 14 Nov 2003 12:01:36 -0500 Message-ID: <3FB50CA4.9080108@techsource.com> Date: Fri, 14 Nov 2003 12:11:00 -0500 From: Timothy Miller User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.0.1) Gecko/20020823 Netscape/7.0 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Linux Kernel Mailing List Subject: "things are about right" kernel test? Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Having recently built a new PC for running Linux, one of the things I wanted to do right away was test to make sure that everything was performing as it should. Periodically, someone will post to the list, complaining about something or other being slow, and then another person responds with a simple kernel parameter change to fix it. Well... What I want to know is if there is any tool that's been developed to determine if various aspects of system performance are within tolerance. (say, I/O scheduler latency/throughput, process scheduler latency/throughput, network, and unrelated things which can have performance issues) My system seems to be just fine, but honestly, I can't really be sure. Despite the fact that it's on mirrored raid of two WD1200JB drives, it doesn't SEEM (insert comment about flawed human perception) to boot much faster than my last Linux box. This is an example of something which I would like to have objective analysis of. Obviously, one way to check this is to run a myriad of performance benchmarks and then compare them to comparable systems, etc. But this is overkill for what I think really only requires a simple "quick and dirty sanity check". If this kind of tool doesn't exist, then I would be interested in taking suggestions to get started on this. Some Q&D tests that I think should be run might include: - Check disk perf by reading and writing a file larger than RAM. We sanity check this by comparing against results from other systems. - Check memory perf. We should be able to test different kinds or systems with different kinds of RAM and have the program check to see if actual system performance is sane. - Don't know what to do about network performance without a special setup. I recall some people mentioning that if they have 1GiB of RAM, something (I forget what) performs badly. They set it to 900-some MiB, and then things work better. A test for that with built-in tips for solving the problem might be helpful. In fact, there are numerous things which I have seen mentioned which require tweaks and require simple suggestions to fix. In addition to being a sanity check, this program could act as sortof a FAQ for people with common problems. They run it, it finds the problem, and then tells them what to do about it. Furthermore, this can help kernel developers with identifying problems with new systems (KT600, for example). Right now, I'm going to go off and code up some simple stuff to demonstrate that I'm serious about this. :)