benchmark program

A program that attempts to provide a consistent measurement of system performance. Here are some examples:

• Dhrystone, which measures microprocessor and memory performance
• Whetstone, which measures speed of arithmetic operations
• Khornerstone, which measures overall system performance, including disk-drive access speed, memory access speed, and processor performance

The Systems Performance Evaluation Cooperative (SPEC) developed a set of ten tests to measure performance in actual application environments. The results of these tests are known as SPECmarks.