Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 Released With New Result Viewer, Offline/Enterprise Benchmarking Enhancements

Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 is now available as the latest quarterly feature release to our cross-platform, open-source automated benchmarking framework. With Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 comes a rewritten result viewer to offer more result viewing functionality previously only exposed locally via the command-line or through a Phoromatic Server (or OpenBenchmarking.org when results are uploaded), new offline/enterprise usage improvements, various hardware/software detection enhancements on different platforms, and a variety of other additions.

Most visible to Phoronix Test Suite users with the 9.0-Asker release is the new result viewer. The classic XSL+JavaScript result viewer has been around for over a decade with varying facelifts over time while this new result viewer is dynamic and makes use of PHP's built-in web server functionality to offer a dynamic result viewer akin to what is offered by the Phoromatic Server or OpenBenchmarking.org. The result viewer is only available on the local system under test by default (various tunables are exposed via the Phoronix Test Suite user configuration file) and from this new result viewer is the ability to dynamically merge result files, easily export the results to PDF/TXT/CSV, and various other viewing options that weren't available with the previous result viewer unless using the command-line or uploading the results to OpenBenchmarking.org or a Phoromatic Server instance. With Phoronix Test Suite 9.2 will come more enhancements while already this new result viewer is much more capable than the prior one, which is still available as a fall-back.

Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 also brings new result visualizations / graphing options, various statistical reporting improvements, and better PDF report generation from result files.

On the enterprise/offline front are also various improvements. With Phoronix Test Suite 9.0, a static cache of the available tests/suites as of release time are included in the bundle. This addresses an area where users have long sought better workflow when running the Phoronix Test Suite offline/behind-the-firewall. When Internet support is present, the Phoronix Test Suite will continue to query OpenBenchmarking.org as it's always done for being able to easily provide new/updated tests beyond what is found in the static cache.

Also for helping enterprise benchmarking use-cases is the ability to permanently disable OpenBenchmarking.org result uploading functionality from the Phoronix Test Suite client. It's possible to trivially remove the entire OpenBenchmarking.org result uploading support by simply deleting a file from the Phoronix Test Suite installation or alternatively there is now a new user configuration option as well to not prompt the user for uploading results. These changes should help those concerned about accidentally uploading benchmark results publicly in the case of confidential testing, etc.

More details on the offline/enterprise improvements via this earlier article and the associated documentation. New sub-commands in Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 include stress-batch-run, compare-results-two-way, and result-file-confidence, all of which are described in the Phoronix Test Suite documentation.

There are also many smaller Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 improvements as outlined via the GitHub release. Phoronix Test Suite 9.0 can also be downloaded at Phoronix-Test-Suite.com.