What else than monitoring how the various aspects of the system load (memorywise, CPU-wise, etc.) change under a well defined job load? You put some task onto a machine and monitor how long it takes, how much memory it needs, how many CPU cycles it takes, ...., yes?
So, in a sense, the best benchmarking tool is "time", which measures how long a command takes, for most of the other aspects mentioned before NMON is a good tool to record them (use the "daemon mode" for that, the option is "-F").
But maybe i have misunderstood you completely and you are looking for benchmark tests, something like SPECfp, SPECint, LINPACK, etc. You might want to consult the website of the TPC (Transaction Processing Council) in this case (
Transaction Processing Performance Council). Most if not all of the relevant benchmarks are done already for existing machines and probably you can find the result of what you intend to do there.
The benchmark results there are very database-oriented, maybe you are more interested in synthetical benchmarks, which better reflect the various aspects of "performance" better - bandwidth of memory interface, integer operations, second-/third-level cache hit/miss-ratios, etc. Then you might be better off at the Standard Performance Evaluations Corporations website (
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation).
I hope this helps.
bakunin
