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Sergey
Asked: 2012-03-07 20:29:54 +0800 CST

How do I measure performance of a virtual server?

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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.

server command-line performance tools

2 Answers

  1. Best 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
...
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  2. That may not be possible. You're not providing any details, so noone can provide specific answers. But not all VPSes means virtual hardware. You have all kinds of different solutions, like Linux Containers (LXC) which is radically different from rending a virtual machine with certain specifics.

    The sole point of sharing hardware is to reuse it. In your case, even if you are using virtualized hardware, you can't be certain you're the only one to use it. If you need information about hardware utilization, then you should get a co-located physical server instead.

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