This software benchmarks Linux interactivity by measuring performance and response time.
The software essentially emulates the CPU scheduling behaviour of interactive tasks and measures their scheduling latency and jitter. It can simulate both a single task and the presence of several background loads, each running at configurable nice levels. Additionally, the benchmarked tasks can run in real-time.
Interbench conducts its tests by first benchmarking the best method to reproduce a fixed percentage of CPU usage in the current machine. It then saves this process to a file and uses it consistently in all subsequent benchmarking sessions to ensure emulation of the same CPU usage.
The software runs a high priority timing thread, which wakes up the thread of the simulated interactive tasks and measures the latency in scheduling. Since no accurate timer-driven scheduling is available in Linux, the timing thread sleeps as accurately as Linux kernel supports, and latency is calculated as the time from this sleep until the simulated task is scheduled.
Each benchmarked simulation runs as a separate process with its threads, and the background load (if any) also runs as a distinct process. Overall, Interbench is an efficient tool that enables users to accurately evaluate the performance of their Linux machines, analyze the changes in the system design or configuration, and optimize their hardware configurations appropriately.
Version 0.31: N/A