SYSTEM UTILITY GtkStressTesting
Version: 0.7.5 Web: https://gitlab.com/leinardi/gst
Benchmarking a Linux system can be a challenging business due to a limited toolset. We’re not including manual measurements using an ordinary Bash command entered after time . Instead we’re interested in more professional utilities.
One such tool is GtkStressTesting, a highly developed test suite designed for stress-testing your CPU and memory (but so far mainly the CPU). On the one hand, GtkStressTesting mirrors tools such as CPU-Z because it shows a wealth of information about the processor including clock, number of cores and detailed family specification, along with some main motherboard details. On the other hand, GtkStressTesting enables you to run sophisticated synthetic benchmark with one click of your mouse.
The upper-left part of the window has a drop-down menu with the list of available tests. Select the stress period, press Start and wait for a while. After the tool has finishes the test, the results will appear below, in the Bogo Ops and BOPSUST fields. Those figures represent bogus operations per second, with the first (bigger) number for the total iterations count, and the second (smaller) for the operations per second rate. Now you may wonder what this crazy rocket science is for, but in fact GtkStressTesting is a tool of great practical use. The most obvious case is comparing several different Linux kernels, possibly built with different compilers.
The program can quickly detect performance regressions or stability issues, especially when running a stressor for a long period. Various kernel parameters that we sometimes use in the Grub2 configuration also contribute to performance, be it a fix for a known CPU vulnerability or a different I/O governor. Consider stress-testing your CPU to find out if your desktop remains responsive or your cooling system can handle the extra heat, or the overclocking was a worthwhile intrusion, or whatever else strikes your fancy.
Under the hood GtkStressTesting is backed by the CLI tool stress-ng, which does all the dirty work. Thanks to the neatly built GUI offered by GtkStressTesting, you no longer need to mess with CLI mode.