Benchmark
A benchmark is everything that gives you an idea about performance. For your Linux, you can use the following benchmarks:
Disk I/O
Best, use
hdparm -tT
or use a file system benchmark on the same file system to compare disks. You can also use dd, but read Background: How Caches work first.
File system
Network
For network, you have to take into consideration Bandwidth, latency and throughput. Use ethtool to find out if your NIC is set to 10, 100 or 1000 Mb/s.
Throughput
Use netcat, for example on the receiver:
netcat -l -p 8000 >/dev/null
and on the sender in the bash:
dd if=test bs=1024K count=512 > /dev/tcp/192.168.0.9/8000
a result can be:
4887552 bytes (4.9 MB) copied, 4.3689 s, 1.1 MB/s
An interesting thing is that if you forget the >/dev/null you will come to a pretty constant value which is useless because it tells you how quickly the shell can write nulls.
Latency
Use ping.
Web server
Use ab.
Graphic card
Watching a video feels sluggish on one computer, but on the other it is okay ? Test your graphics card with glxgears like this:
$ glxgears 359 frames in 5.1 seconds = 70.397 FPS 320 frames in 5.1 seconds = 62.590 FPS 320 frames in 5.3 seconds = 60.201 FPS 320 frames in 5.1 seconds = 63.046 FPS 300 frames in 5.4 seconds = 55.305 FPS 340 frames in 5.4 seconds = 62.724 FPS 300 frames in 5.2 seconds = 57.543 FPS 340 frames in 5.4 seconds = 62.483 FPS 320 frames in 5.1 seconds = 62.149 FPS 320 frames in 5.2 seconds = 61.365 FPS 300 frames in 5.1 seconds = 59.275 FPS 320 frames in 5.5 seconds = 58.109 FPS 320 frames in 5.1 seconds = 62.149 FPS