- The benchmarks are all in C, fairly portable (although they do prefer to be compiled with GCC). This is useful for generating a set of apples to apples systems comparisons.
- LMbench is very useful for motivating action. When confronted with numbers that prove that BloatOS is 4 times slower than all of the competition, resources tend to get allocated to fix the problems.
- The database of results includes runs from most all of the major computer workstation manufactors.
- The memory latency test shows the latency of all of the system (data) caches, i.e., level 1, 2, and 3, if present, as well as main memory and TLB miss latency. In addition the sizes of the caches can be read off of a properly plotted set of results. The hardware folks like this. This benchmark has found bugs in operating system page coloring schemes.
- Everybody seems to love context switching numbers. This particular benchmark is quite careful not to just quote the ``in cache'' numbers. It varies both the number and size of the procesess and plots the results in such a way that it is easy to see when you don't fit in the cache. You can also see the real costs of a cold cache context switch.
- Sun & SGI have used these benchmarks to find and fix performance
problems.
- Intel used them during P6 development.
- Linus uses them to do performance tuning of Linux.
- Intel used them during P6 development.
- The source is small, readable, and easy to extend. It is routinely massaged into different form to measure something else. For example, the networking metrics include libraries to handle connection establishment, server shutdowns, etc.
