Essential System Tools: hyperfine – command-line benchmarking tool

Last Updated on May 28, 2022

This is the latest in our series of articles highlighting essential system tools. These are small, indispensable utilities, useful for system administrators as well as regular users of Linux based systems. The series examines both graphical and text based open source utilities. For details of all tools in this series, please visit Excellent Ways to Manage Your System – Essential System Tools.

For this article, we look at hyperfine, a command-line benchmarking tool. It’s designed to measure the full execution time of a program. This open source tool is written in the Rust programming language.

If you’re interesting in learning Rust, check out our recommended free Rust books.

Installation

To install the software, clone the project’s GitHub repository, and use cargo — Rust’s package manager.

$ git clone https://github.com/sharkdp/hyperfine.git
$ cd hyperfine
$ cargo install hyperfine

By default, hyperline is installed to $HOME/.cargo/bin. You’ll need to make sure that directory is in your $PATH. The variable $PATH is set by your shell every time it launches, but you can set it so that it always includes your new path with every new shell you open. The exact way to do this depends on which shell you’re running.

If you don’t wish to compile the source code, the developer provides his own package for Ubuntu.

I’ve not had the time to check how widespread there’s support in official repositories of other popular Linux distros, but there are packages for Fedora and Alpine Linux in their official repositories. And there’s a package for hyperfine in the Arch User Repository.

There’s also official binaries for Mac OS X, and Windows.

Next page: Page 2 – In Operation

Pages in this article:
Page 1 – Introduction / Installation
Page 2 – In Operation
Page 3 – Other Features
Page 4 – Summary