Hi everyone. Iv been recompiling the kernel (2.6.20) and experimenting with different options and I'm wondering if anyone knows of any good benchmarking software to realistically compare the performance of the custom kernels for core system operations ect.

Thanks

I don't know what would be 'the best' application to do this, but for a somewhat basic benchmark tester, check into 'nBench' which can be located on sourceforge.net and elsewhere. It runs 10 different benchmarking tests over a few minutes and produces 3 categories of results. It may not prove anything absolute, but will give you an idea if your configuration or settings have improved kernel efficiency or worsened it.
I use it to check the results of BIOS memory timing adjustments and PCI/AGP timing adjustments.
It's been around forever, updated as required, and is very simple to install and use.

Another way of benchmarking involves using a compiler to compile a relatively large sourcecode, and timing the job while watching CPU usage and memory usage.

Google has many links to Linux Benchmarking apps and sites.