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

harddisk 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 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)