MBW

MBW (Memory Bandwidth Benchmark) is an open source command-line software written in C and designed to determine the "copy" memory bandwidth that is available to the programs located in userspace.

The program features a simplistic approach, emulating that of real applications. In addition, the software isn’t aware of hardware architectures and it only works with UNIX-like operating systems.

Getting started with MBW

To install and use this command-line program, you have two options. While the first method involves downloading the native installer for RPM-based distributions, the second method involves compiling the source code.

If your distribution of Linux isn’t using the RPM Package Manager and it doesn’t include MBW in the its main software repositories, you must download the source tarball of the program from Softoware or via its official website (see link at the end of the review).

Save the gzipped archive somewhere on your PC, extract its contents with your favorite archive manager software, fire up your preferred terminal emulator app and navigate to the location of the extracted archive files using the ‘cd’ command (e.g. cd /home/softoware/mbw).

There, you will have to simply type the ‘make’ command to compile the program, a task that will take a second. After a successful compilation process, you can use the software directly from the source folder by typing ‘mbw’ or install it system wide with the ‘make install’ or ‘sudo make install’ commands.

Command-line options

To view the help message for learning the available options, you can used the ‘mbw -h’ command in a terminal emulator. Also, you should watch out for swap usage or turn off swap before using this application.

Command-line options include the ability to specify the number of runs per test, to run a dumb test, to run a memcpy test, to run a memcpy test with fixed block size, to specify the block size in bytes for the memcpy test with fixed block size, as well as to not display average and run in quite mode.

What is new in this release:

• Fix labeling of the displayed results. Add version number to --help.

What is new in version 1.3:

• Bugfix release.