Need a small program to test Linux speed for science fair.

My son is comparing Linux distributions for speed on an old computer. He's going to boot live CD's from several different groups on one computer, then run some performance tests. He's 10, came up with this all by himself, and brilliant (proud father).

He asked me to help him find a suitable test program. It would need to be able to run across all distro's, from full service like Ubuntu, to bare bones like DSL. We want something simple that is easy to repeat and can show the speed of the system with the software being used. I've thought about opening large files and timing how long it takes, stuff like that. But I know there are test programs that do what we want.

Anyone have any suggestions?

Thanks,

Jeff

http://hardinfo.berlios.de/HomePage

Search Google for linux benchmarking programs. I haven't used any but http://hardinfo.berlios.de looks easy to use at first glance.

edit: Grtechguy beat me to it!

Oh c'mon, he's ten and he can't roll his own benchmarking program? :eyeroll:

I keed, I keed....

LiveCD versions aren't good benchmarks. Just sayin'. Comparing Slax Linux run from a CD to Slax Linux installed on a hard drive will net about the same result. Most of the OS sits in RAM whenever possible anyway. An Ubuntu liveCD is MUCH slower because the OS has to access the media more often. For a real comparison, you really need to do hard drive installs with a fresh format each time.

Storage benchmarks obviously won't be any use when running from a LiveCD, but processing benchmarks should be perfectly valid.

Of course the results will basically just be affected by the number of other processes vying for CPU time, so the results will be the OSes sorted from lightest to heaviest.