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How do I measure performance of a virtual server?

rated 0 times [ 14] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 15607 / 2 Years ago, thu, december 23, 2021, 9:53:21

I've got a VPS running Ubuntu. Being a virtual server, I understand that it shares resources with unknown number of other servers, and I'm noticing that it's considerably slower than my desktop machine.

Is there some tool to measure the performance of the virtual machine? I'd be curious to see some approximate measure similar to bogomips, possibly for CPU (operations/sec), memory and disk read/write speed. I'd like to be able to compare those numbers to my desktop machine.

I'm not interested in the specs of the actual physical machine my VPS is running on - by doing cat /proc/cpuinfo I can see that it's a nice quad-core Xeon machine, but it doesn't matter to me. I'm basically interested in how fast a program would run in my VPS - how many CPU operations it can make in a second, how many bytes to write to RAM or to disk.

I only have ssh access to the machine so the tool need to be command-line.

I could write a script which, say, does some calculations in a loop for a second and counts how many loops it was able to do, or something similar to measure disk and RAM performance. But I'm sure something like this already exists.

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nalystcul

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1 Year ago

answered 2 Years ago mentpengu · Accepted Answer

Well, since nobody wants to answer... :)

Searching Synaptic for "bench" finds a lot of benchmarking suites capable of testing different aspects of a machine. The only one I heard about previously is phoronix-test-suite, which I'm sure is very comprehensive although my short attention span didn't allow me to figure out how to use it.

Then I found UnixBench, which is described as

UnixBench is the original BYTE UNIX benchmark suite, updated and
revised by many people over the years.

The purpose of UnixBench is to provide a basic indicator of the
performance of a Unix-like system; ... These test results
are then compared to the scores from a baseline system to produce an
index value, which is generally easier to handle than the raw scores.

Multi-CPU systems are handled. ... The tests compare Unix systems by
comparing their results to a set of scores set by running the code on
a benchmark system, which is a SPARCstation 20-61 (rated at 10.0).

UnixBench is mentioned by Linode as a tool for VM performance testing in this blog post:

Using identical hardware, KVM Linodes are much faster compared to Xen.
For example, in our UnixBench testing a KVM Linode scored 3x better
than a Xen Linode.

The test suite is NOT in Ubuntu repositories, but it is trivial to download and compile it:

wget https://github.com/kdlucas/byte-unixbench/archive/master.zip

unzip ./master.zip

cd ./byte-unixbench-master/UnixBench

./Run

The tests take a while to finish. The output looks like

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Benchmark Run: Mon Oct 15 2012 23:55:22 - 00:23:16

4 CPUs in system; running 1 parallel copy of tests



Dhrystone 2 using register variables       12015218.4 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)

Double-Precision Whetstone                     2214.8 MWIPS (10.1 s, 7 samples)

Execl Throughput                                896.9 lps   (30.0 s, 2 samples)

File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks         58968.3 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)

File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks           14578.6 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)

File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks        422068.2 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)

Pipe Throughput                               70993.3 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)

Pipe-based Context Switching                  16001.5 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)

Process Creation                               1861.8 lps   (30.0 s, 2 samples)

Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                   2525.5 lpm   (60.0 s, 2 samples)

Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                    737.8 lpm   (60.1 s, 2 samples)

System Call Overhead                         432496.2 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)



System Benchmarks Index Values               BASELINE       RESULT    INDEX

Dhrystone 2 using register variables         116700.0   12015218.4   1029.6

Double-Precision Whetstone                       55.0       2214.8    402.7

Execl Throughput                                 43.0        896.9    208.6

File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks          3960.0      58968.3    148.9

File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks            1655.0      14578.6     88.1

File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks          5800.0     422068.2    727.7

Pipe Throughput                               12440.0      70993.3     57.1

Pipe-based Context Switching                   4000.0      16001.5     40.0

Process Creation                                126.0       1861.8    147.8

Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                     42.4       2525.5    595.6

Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                      6.0        737.8   1229.7

System Call Overhead                          15000.0     432496.2    288.3

                                                                   ========

System Benchmarks Index Score                                         249.7



------------------------------------------------------------------------

Benchmark Run: Tue Oct 16 2012 00:23:16 - 00:51:20

4 CPUs in system; running 4 parallel copies of tests



Dhrystone 2 using register variables       42619039.2 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)

Double-Precision Whetstone                     8274.0 MWIPS (10.4 s, 7 samples)

Execl Throughput                               3398.5 lps   (30.0 s, 2 samples)

File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks         68332.4 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)

File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks           21462.9 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)

File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks        718205.6 KBps  (30.0 s, 2 samples)

Pipe Throughput                              149713.5 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)

Pipe-based Context Switching                  61968.3 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)

Process Creation                               5321.7 lps   (30.0 s, 2 samples)

Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                   5957.1 lpm   (60.0 s, 2 samples)

Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                    812.6 lpm   (60.1 s, 2 samples)

System Call Overhead                        1557391.5 lps   (10.0 s, 7 samples)



System Benchmarks Index Values               BASELINE       RESULT    INDEX

Dhrystone 2 using register variables         116700.0   42619039.2   3652.0

Double-Precision Whetstone                       55.0       8274.0   1504.4

Execl Throughput                                 43.0       3398.5    790.4

File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks          3960.0      68332.4    172.6

File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks            1655.0      21462.9    129.7

File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks          5800.0     718205.6   1238.3

Pipe Throughput                               12440.0     149713.5    120.3

Pipe-based Context Switching                   4000.0      61968.3    154.9

Process Creation                                126.0       5321.7    422.4

Shell Scripts (1 concurrent)                     42.4       5957.1   1405.0

Shell Scripts (8 concurrent)                      6.0        812.6   1354.3

System Call Overhead                          15000.0    1557391.5   1038.3

                                                                   ========

System Benchmarks Index Score                                         592.5

Which means that the VPS in question has a score of 249.7 for single task and 592.5 for parallel processing.

My desktop machine, while having similar or lower specs to the physical machine my VPS is running on, produced a score of 1409.7 for single task and 5156.3 for parallel processing. Exactly the kind of metric I was looking for.

Another important metric is network speed. I've found a script which downloads test files from different locations and measures download speed. The script can be run with

wget freevps.us/downloads/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash

(although it probably would be safer to download the script and inspect its contents before running)

To monitor disk I/O latency there is ioping utility which can be installed from Ubuntu repositories:

# ioping . -c 10

4096 bytes from . (ext4 /dev/disk/...): request=1 time=16.4 ms

4096 bytes from . (ext4 /dev/disk/...): request=2 time=16.1 ms

...