How to see the hardware benchmark results?

Question

Substrate has introduced a flag called --no-hardware-benchmarks to disable automatic hardware benchmarks. This implies if the flag is not set, the benchmark should run automatically at startup and measure the CPU speed. Without this benchmark and using the version of substrate which has this new CLI option, I was expecting to see a report that would give comparable figures to the configuration of substrate reference hardware:

SUBSTRATE_REFERENCE_HARDWARE =
        [
        {
            "metric": "Blake2256",
            "minimum": {
                "MiBs": 1029.0
            }
        },
        {
            "metric": "Sr25519Verify",
            "minimum": {
                "KiBs": 666.0
            }
        },
        {
            "metric": "MemCopy",
            "minimum": {
                "GiBs": 14.323
            }
        },
        {
            "metric": "DiskSeqWrite",
            "minimum": {
                "MiBs": 450.0
            }
        },
        {
            "metric": "DiskRndWrite",
            "minimum": {
                "MiBs": 200.0
            }
        }
      ]

However I couldn't find such logs when I started my node. Is my usage and expectation correct?

Answer 1

A v0.9.27 Polkadot node will print hardware and performance info on startup. It looks like this:

Parity Polkadot    
✌️  version 0.9.27-b017bad50d3    
❤️  by Parity Technologies <[email protected]>, 2017-2022    
📋 Chain specification: Polkadot    
🏷  Node name: ethereal-throne-1125    
⛓  Native runtime: polkadot-9270 (parity-polkadot-0.tx13.au0) 
   
# General hardware info
💻 Operating system: linux    
💻 CPU architecture: x86_64    
💻 Target environment: gnu
💻 CPU: 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-1165G7 @ 2.80GHz    
💻 CPU cores: 4    
💻 Memory: 31831MB    
💻 Kernel: 5.15.0-43-generic    
💻 Linux distribution: Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS    
💻 Virtual machine: no

# Hardware benchmarks
🏁 CPU score: 1063MB/s    
🏁 Memory score: 17465MB/s    
🏁 Disk score (seq. writes): 2793MB/s    
🏁 Disk score (rand. writes): 348MB/s 

📦 Highest known block at #0    
〽️ Prometheus exporter started at 127.0.0.1:9615    

It is also the case for slightly earlier Polkadot versions.
You can see that there are two paragraphs of output that mention either hardware or its performance.
Now the --no-hardware-benchmarks flag will suppress this output by not running the benchmarks.

Additionally you can run them explicitly by calling polkadot benchmark machine.
This performs a longer and more precise benchmark. The output depends on your hardware:

Running machine benchmarks...    
+----------+----------------+--------------+--------------+-------------------+
| Category | Function       | Score        | Minimum      | Result            |
+=============================================================================+
| CPU      | BLAKE2-256     | 994.00 MiB/s | 1.00 GiB/s   | ✅ Pass ( 96.6 %) |
|----------+----------------+--------------+--------------+-------------------|
| CPU      | SR25519-Verify | 652.91 KiB/s | 666.00 KiB/s | ✅ Pass ( 98.0 %) |
|----------+----------------+--------------+--------------+-------------------|
| Memory   | Copy           | 15.46 GiB/s  | 14.32 GiB/s  | ✅ Pass (107.9 %) |
|----------+----------------+--------------+--------------+-------------------|
| Disk     | Seq Write      | 2.48 GiB/s   | 450.00 MiB/s | ✅ Pass (564.8 %) |
|----------+----------------+--------------+--------------+-------------------|
| Disk     | Rnd Write      | 300.62 MiB/s | 200.00 MiB/s | ✅ Pass (150.3 %) |
+----------+----------------+--------------+--------------+-------------------+
From 5 benchmarks in total, 5 passed and 0 failed (10% fault tolerance).    
The hardware meets the requirements