b (Benchmark) command

Measures speed of the CPU and checks RAM for errors.

Syntax

b [number_of_iterations] [-mmt{N}] [-md{N}] [-mm={Method}]

There are two tests:

1. Compressing with LZMA method
2. Decompressing with LZMA method

The benchmark shows a rating in MIPS (million instructions per second). The rating value is calculated from the measured CPU speed and it is normalized with Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (2.4 GHz, 4 MB L2) CPU in 64-bit Windows with multi-threading option switched off. So if you have Intel Core 2 Duo, rating values must be close to real CPU frequency.

You can change the upper dictionary size to increase memory usage by -md{N} switch. Also, you can change the number of threads by -mmt{N} switch.

The Dict column shows dictionary size. For example, 21 means 2^21 = 2 MB.

The Usage column shows the percentage of time the processor is working. It's normalized for a one-thread load. For example, 180% CPU Usage for 2 threads can mean that average CPU usage is about 90% for each thread.

The R / U column shows the rating normalized for 100% of CPU usage. That column shows the performance of one average CPU thread.

Avr shows averages for different dictionary sizes.

Tot shows averages of the compression and decompression ratings.

Compression speed and rating strongly depend on memory (RAM) latency.

Decompression speed and rating strongly depend on the integer performance of the CPU. For example, the Intel Pentium 4 has big branch misprediction penalty (which is an effect of its long pipeline) and pretty slow multiply and shift operations. So, the Pentium 4 has pretty low decompressing ratings.

You can run a CRC calculation benchmark by specifying -mm=crc. That test shows the speed of CRC calculation in MB/s. The first column shows the size of the block. The next column shows the speed of CRC calculation for one thread. The other columns are results for multi-threaded CRC calculation.

Examples

7z b

7z b -mmt1 -md26

7z b 30

runs benchmarking with default settings for 30 iterations.