A Stream Of Linux Hardware Data Soon To Be Tapped

Earlier this week I mentioned how the Phoronix Test Suite can use Btrfs to find regressions incredibly fast in conjunction with Phoromatic as part of our Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 efforts. For a while I've also been mentioning that a complete overhaul of Phoronix Global is in store for this Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 milestone that should be reached by year's end. While I'm not yet prepared to share many of those plans for Phoronix Global, there are some interesting statistics worth sharing about the Phoronix Test Suite and Phoronix Global usage up to this point.

For those that have been living under a rock the past two and a half years or just aren't up to speed on our open-source benchmarking software, Phoronix Global is an online component to the Phoronix Test Suite that allows individuals/organizations to upload their test results, compare test results remotely, and to browse results uploaded by other individuals and organizations. Any test written for the Phoronix Test Suite is able to inherently use Phoronix Global for managing test results and other unprecedented capabilities. Phoronix Global also supports user registrations, upload tags, searching by installed software/hardware components, and various other features. From the Phoronix Test Suite it's as easy as running a simple command like phoronix-test-suite benchmark anon-17683-22950-10008 to compare your system to the results of someone else's. Well, that's what Phoronix Global has been providing since around Phoronix Test Suite v0.1, but with Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 its capabilities will absolutely flourish and resemble an entirely different beast that will distinguish it even more.

The only numbers that have been publicly provided from Phoronix Global thus far have been some CPU and GPU usage numbers from earlier this year showing the most common processors and graphics cards by those uploading test results to our online system. However, here are a few more numbers.

As of right now, there are more than 30,000 result submissions to Phoronix Global (with many of those result submissions containing multiple tests within them). Those 30,000+ submissions have been viewed on the web-site in total more than 3.1 million times and that isn't counting the number of times the results have been cloned by users when benchmarking against them.

Introduced in Phoronix Test Suite 2.4 was the option to anonymously submit test information to Phoronix Global, such as the time it takes to complete a test run, and since then there have been more than 90,000 unique test runs that have been reported to Phoronix Global from those opting to submit this information.

Just two months ago in Phoronix Test Suite 2.6.1 the capability was added for the user to opt-in to reporting anonymous hardware/system information whenever the Phoronix Test Suite is run. There are more than 10,000 unique systems now being tracked by Phoronix Global with their hardware/software/driver information that will in the end provide some very interesting statistics about Linux hardware (along with Mac OS X, BSD, OpenSolaris, and even Windows) usage.

Up to this point, much of this data isn't even being well utilized, but that is changing. This mountain of data (though by the rate it's been building, by the time Phoronix Test Suite 3.0 is here the data-set is going to be even larger) will be publicly exposed and heavily utilized with the new Phoronix Global roll-out and will provide many useful functions whether you are a researcher or just a hobbyist working on locating your system's bottleneck or to decide on the next component to upgrade. Stay tuned!