dpkg-benchmark

A set of scripts to benchmark package installation in different conditions. It uses force-unsafe-io option and libeatmydata to gain more speed from dpkg. It is suitable both for HDD and SSD (supports TRIM).

Generates a pretty graph showing the amount of time needed for packages to be installed (in seconds).

Installation

No installation required. However you need some dependencies:

• debootstrap
• bc for floating point calculations
• Python 3.X
• Gnuplot

Usage

First prepare an archived container using debootstrap (run as root)

# mkdir stretch
# debootstrap stretch ./stretch http://mirror.yandex.ru/debian
# tar cpJf stretch-deboostrapped.tar.xz --one-file-system -C stretch .

Second, find or create an empty disc partition for benchmarking. It will be formatted many times, so ensure there is no important data out there! Let it be /dev/sdXY.

You are now ready to launch a benchmark (run as root)

# ./dpkg-benchmark.sh stretch-deboostrapped.tar.xz /dev/sdXY

This will create dpkg-benchmark.sdXY.log file with time values (real, user, sys).

Average raw data, sort it and convert to convinient format for Gnuplot.

$ ./benchmark-analyze.py dpkg-benchmark.sdXY.log

This will create normal, unsafeio and eatmydata files.

Finally create a nice graph plot.svg.

$ ./draw.plt

Fine-tuning

• You can adjust the number of each test repetitions in RUNS_NUM variable in dpkg-benchmark.sh.
• A set of packages to be installed is stored in PACKAGES variable.
• dpkg-benchmark.sh currently supports only ext4 filesystem. It's possible to add other filesystems support with different mount parameters if needed.
• It's possible to heavily customize the graph. Just read carefully draw.plt and experiment with constants.