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How can I benchmark the performance of a particular software not complete system? I know various tools are available for system benchmarking. But I want to benchmark the performance of a particular software for example truecrypt. I want to know what time and cpu usage does different operations (like encryption, decryption, mounting, reading and writing of files etc.) in truecrypt takes. I want to do this to compare the performances of different software.

Can someone suggest a open source tool or any tool for linux platform that can do this?

Thanks,

ρss
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Sometimes programs themselves have a 'benchmark' setting; this is particularly true of the example you give, Truecrypt. The benchmark can be accessed from Tools > benchmark. The benchmark tests how fast your CPU can crunch through the encryption algorithms (see screenshot). The performance of your machine will be vastly increased if your CPU supports AES hardware encryption/decryption. That setting is available from settings > preferences > performance.

enter image description here

There are specific tests available to gauge GTK+ and filesystem performance in the repositories that can be found with apt-cache search benchmark, and the benchmarking tool in Peazip will give you some archive compression/decompression figures, which are not particularly useful. That is the problem really, often the results mean little and are what you would expect for your hardware configuration.

Program such as iotop and htop will provide very useful information regarding your current programs and processes, and with iotop you can see if there is a bottleneck somewhere on your system by studying the data presented. You can study these while performing intense tasks such as encryption/decryption or video transcoding.

However, the phoronix-test-suite, available in the repositories, also has specific tests such as ones for CPU encryption/decryption performance, some for archive compression/decompression, gtk, and for every test you could think of. See my answer in this related question and run 

phoronix-test-suite list-tests

to see all the tests available.

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  • Hello Mik, Thanks for all efforts! I already know about this benchmark in truecrypt. Don't only think about truecrypt, just think in general. I want to compare encfs, truecrypt, etc. I want to know what time is taken by these software to perform various operations like encryption, decryption, reading data, writing data, mounting , unmounting etc. The main thing is I want to compare the performances. I don't want a tool that is doing this task for a complete system, I need a tool can give performance results for particular software not complete system. Thanks! – ρss Dec 02 '12 at 12:36
  • I think this would be possible by running an application on a system and running the benchmarking tool in parallel. By this I can get the system performance with respect to that application. Similarly I can do this for some other application and get system performance. Then I can compare both of these system performances to get performance differences of those two applications. Is this approach correct? Thanks – ρss Dec 03 '12 at 19:37
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    @facebook-100004187197796 Benchmarking is a tricky subject, as there is great debate on what is a good benchmark and how to measure performance. I am still looking for a more suitable application for you, but programs such as iotop will show you details about how an individual application is performing, and top will show more general information about an application. –  Dec 03 '12 at 19:46