The command-line tool pmgperf gathers some general performance data. This is mostly useful for debugging and identifying performance bottlenecks. It computes the following metrics:

CPU BOGOMIPS

bogomips sum of all CPUs

REGEX/SECOND

regular expressions per second (perl performance test), should be above 1000000.

HD SIZE

hard disk size

BUFFERED READS

simple HD read test. Modern HDs should reach at least 100 MB/sec

AVERAGE SEEK TIME

tests average seek time. Fast SCSI HDs reach values < 8 milliseconds. Common IDE/SATA disks get values from 15 to 20 ms. SSD seek times should be below 1ms.

FSYNCS/SECOND

value should be greater than 200 (you should enable write-back cache mode on you RAID controller - needs a battery backed cache (BBWC)).

DNS EXT

average time to resolve an external DNS name

DNS INT

average time to resolve a local DNS name

Here is an example of the output generated by the tool:

# pmgperf
CPU BOGOMIPS:      16759.60
REGEX/SECOND:      1186304
HD SIZE:           60.78 GB (/dev/sda1)
BUFFERED READS:    209.84 MB/sec
AVERAGE SEEK TIME: 1.24 ms
FSYNCS/SECOND:     2198.79
DNS EXT:           35.69 ms
DNS INT:           1.41 ms (yourdomain.tld)