As a computer hardware enthusiast, I’ve always been keen on getting the best performance and reliability out of all my machines. Whenever I build a new box, one of the first things I like to do after installing the OS is “burn-in” testing to make sure it can hold up under a heavy processing load. For the last five years or so, my preferred burn-in tool of choice has been the Phoronix Test Suite (PTS), a free and open source hardware benchmarking tool created by Michael “Phoronix” Larabel for his technology blog. PTS is developed specifically with Linux users in mind (although it works great on many other OSes as well), and so I gave a presentation on it to the Philadelphia Linux Users Group (West) in Malvern, PA this past July. After going through my slideshow (linked below) I did a live demo of the tool for the group measuring hardware performance for SSL encryption, using the PTS web front end “Phoromatic” to automatically benchmark SSL performance on six different machines simultaneously in my home lab.