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linuxbenchmarkingperformance-testing

Why doesn't Benchmarking (Phoronix) Test Suits make complete use of CPU


I am trying to benchmark my ubuntu server and got to know that the Phoronix Test Suite is the most comprehensive test suite for performance testing.

A ran a combined server and computational suits couple of times. But when I check my dashboard and logs, I see that the max CPU usage was only upto 25%

The benchmark tests are suppose to evaluate the max performance capabilities of your system, then how come they only use 25% of CPU and if they aren't making the full use of CPU then how does it justify the integrity of these tests results.

Are there any better test suits to evaluate linux system performance.


Solution

  • Thanks to @Michal's comment, I figured it out that the benchmarking tests were single threaded and hence utilized only one core.

    I tried running the same tests on a 2 and 8 core machines and I got MAX CPU usage to roughly ~50% and ~12.5%

    To check the multi-core performance we need to find other alternatives like Multi-Core suite.