"A consortium devoted to improving Linux for high-end servers will announce on Monday a suite of tools designed to make widely used speed tests available to Linux programmers.
"The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) has released three speed tests, or benchmarks, that correspond to three tests from the Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC). The tests are subsets of benchmarks from the TPC consortium that measure a server's ability to handle an inventory tracking system, extract useful information from large data sets, and run a large online bookstore.
"Benchmarks are important for customers who want to find which computer systems give them the most bang for their bucks. But benchmarks also are important for programmers trying to evaluate what changes are a good idea..."
