Hi all. I am going to be changing my system around and want to do some before/after testing. I'm thinking of doing some local copying of files, as well as some network stuff too.

I've got the basic system stuff, but I need to know how I can calculate (somewhat precisely) the amount of time it takes for the process, as well as the system resources taken up at that time (I'm thinking 'free' will handle that).

Does anybody know how I can do this and/or have any suggestions for the kind of stuff I can test that are considered good benchmark tests?

Any help would be appreciated.

I don't have any experience with this, but a search on freshmeat turned up several benchmarking utilities.

For this, you may want to have a look at the "time" utility. For example:

shell> time tar xjf linux-2.4.20.tar.bz2

prints (on my machine):

real 1m18.064s
user 0m43.740s
sys 0m3.670s

For more info see "man time".

Thanks Hko, it looks like time is just what I was looking for (go figure).

Thanks for the link too, wapcaplet I might try out a couple of them.