The Latest Features For Linux Performance Management + Benchmark Monitoring

There's numerous recent features to talk about this weekend for those interested in tracking Linux system performance, monitoring upstream projects for performance regressions, and carrying out other similar work using open-source software on Linux / BSD / OS X / Solaris.

With the Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 release coming in the next few weeks, I've been very busy finishing up work on some of the new features for the Phoronix Test Suite and its built-in Phoromatic client/server. For those out of the loop, "Phoromatic is the remote management system of the Phoronix Test Suite. Phoromatic allows the automatic (hence the name Phoro-matic) scheduling of tests, remote installation of new tests, and the management of multiple test systems all through an intuitive, easy-to-use web interface. Tests can be scheduled to automatically run on a routine basis across multiple test systems. The test results are then available from this centralized, web-based location. Any test available via OpenBenchmarking.org can be run via Phoromatic."

Already for Phoronix Test Suite 5.8 there's new Phoromatic improvements as has been a big focus for the Phoronix Test Suite 5.x development cycles, a live halt/reboot option, Juju cloud benchmarking support courtesy of Canonical, and many other random improvements. In this article is a look at some of the new Phoromatic improvements that have landed in the past few days for improving real-time Linux benchmarking and performance management.

The Phoromatic Dashboard will look quite different when running the latest code on GitHub. Among other small styling improvements, the prominent real-time system sensors are now graphed on this page. This now allows the dashboard to be used for not only looking at the state of each system with what test(s) are being run, the estimated time for those tests (or other tasks) to finish, and other prominent information, but you can also get an instant look at the system vitals like CPU usage, memory usage, and temperatures.

When clicking on a system or otherwise going to its individual system page, there's also graphs for all of the available system hardware/software sensors as supported by the Phoronix Test Suite's Phodevi library. This includes various temperatures from the system to GPU, clock speeds from the CPU to GPU, iowait times, disk read/write speeds, and much more.

There will be more UI/UX improvements in the coming days and then some major work on the Phoromatic design is slated for Phoronix Test Suite 6.0 later this year, but so far things are off to a great start for easily managing the benchmarks of dozens -- or even hundreds/thousands of systems as is the case for some Phoronix Test Suite customers.