UnixBench is the original BYTE UNIX benchmark suite, updated and revised by many people over the years.
The purpose of UnixBench is to provide a basic indicator of the performance of a Unix-like system; hence, multiple tests are used to test various aspects of the system's performance. These test results are then compared to the scores from a baseline system to produce an index value, which is generally easier to handle than the raw scores. The entire set of index values is then combined to make an overall index for the system.
Some very simple graphics tests are included to measure the 2D and 3D graphics performance of the system.
Multi-CPU systems are handled. If your system has multiple CPUs, the default behaviour is to run the selected tests twice -- once with one copy of each test program running at a time, and once with N copies, where N is the number of CPUs. This is designed to allow you to assess:
- the performance of your system when running a single task
- the performance of your system when running multiple tasks
- the gain from your system's implementation of parallel processing
David C. Niemi maintained the program for quite some time, and made some major modifications and updates, and produced UnixBench 4. He later gave the program to Ian Smith to maintain. Ian subsequently made some major changes and revised it from version 4 to version 5.
Thanks to Ian Smith for managing the release up to 5.1.3. As of the next release (5.2) Anthony F. Voellm is going to help maintain the code base. The releases will happen once there are enough pull requests to warrent a new release.
The general process will be the following:
- Open a bug annoucing a new release will happen.
- Everything of the dev branch will be run.
- Code will move from the dev branch into main and be tagged. Bug fix releases with increment the subversion and major functionality changes will increase the major version.