Today I wanted to share how I am setting up my test bench for those that are curious. I have decided to use the DINr plates from the folks over at http://www.dinrplate.com/ since their design and implementation are second to none in my humble opinion.
As you can see from the photo below the board is securely fastened to the plate and then that plate is secured to the rail. All of the cables are zip tied to the plate which makes sure that the connections to your Single-Board Computer are not stressed out. The left micro-usb is power, the center micro-usb is for the WiFi dongle and the right is the micro-hdmi to hdmi converter.
I highly recommend this setup if your going to be testing with your boards like I am since I have not found anything that is even close to the features and stability of this since I worked at Kodak. Amazon link to the setup I am using – DIN Rail Mount for Raspberry Pi Zero
Today’s test is with “stress-ng” – Bogo Ops
Stress-ng measures a stress test “throughput” using “bogus operations per second“. The size of a bogo op depends on the stressor being run, and are not comparable between different stressors. They give some rough notion of performance but should not be used as an accurate bench marking figure. They are useful to see if performance changes between kernel versions or different compiler versions used to build stress-ng. One can also use them to get a notional rough comparison of performance between different systems.
NOTE:
They are NOT intended to be a scientifically accurate bench marking metric.
To install this program copy and paste:
sudo apt install stress-ng
To learn more about the program you can read the options:
stress-ng –help | less
and you can read the manual
man stress-ng
Then to run it you would copy and paste:
stress-ng –cpu 0 –io 2 –vm 1 –vm-bytes 1G –timeout 30s –metrics-brief
Even more information if you want to really understand the program:
http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~cking/stress-ng/
Here are my results on both systems:
I will be working with stress-ng over the next few months to see just what I can do with it for future testing. If you know some good commands please share them below.
Here is the command I used on my brothers RaspBerry Pi 3
stress-ng –cpu 4 –io 2 –vm 1 –vm-bytes 256M –timeout 60s
stress-ng –cpu 4 –io 2 –vm 1 –vm-bytes 256M –timeout 60s –metrics
The idea behind these benchmarks is for you to see what the default setting provide you and then, if you want/need to, you can overclock your Single-Board Computer. Overclocking I will cover in later blogs.
So what’s next?
I have started with the command line testing with the RaspBerry Pi Zero W since that is where we can get the basic testing out of the way. The desktop environment on the RaspBerry Pi Zero is not very good for any kind of Internet testing. We will save that for the RaspBerry Pi 3. I will do all of the same tests on the RPi 3 so we can compare them against the RPi Zero W.
I has also planned on making this RaspBerry Pi Zero W into a USB dongle and I am also going to be adding the GPIO header to it.
