loadbearer benchmarks a machine's CPU, memory, disk and network stack, scores every measurement against a shared reference baseline, and grades each component — and the whole machine — on an S‑to‑F scale. Point it at two laptops and it tells you which one wins, by how much, and what's holding the other back.
loadbearer 0.3.0 — assessment Machine ThinkPad-X280 · i5-8350U · 8 threads · 7.0 GiB RAM Profile general · curve k=0.5 · baseline reference-v1 CPU 929 [B] Integer, all cores 37937.0 Mops/s 0.84x 918 high Float, all cores 54982.6 MFLOP/s 0.79x 886 high BLAKE3 hash 3637.5 MiB/s 0.87x 931 high MEMORY 820 [C] Sequential read 14.4 GiB/s 0.65x 809 high Random access latency 131.5 ns 0.72x 850 high DISK 538 [D] Sequential read 371.3 MiB/s 0.12x 352 high Random 4K write 13197.1 IOPS 0.33x 574 low NETWORK 761 [C] · not in overall TCP round-trip latency 17.5 us 0.80x 893 medium UDP send rate 259.0 Kpps 0.58x 759 high OVERALL 743 [C] Why: - held back by Disk (score 538) - held back by Memory (score 820) - low measurement confidence in: Disk
Raw MiB/s and Mops/s don't tell you whether laptop A beats laptop B. loadbearer turns them into a grade, a verdict, and a reason.
CPU, memory, disk and network each get a score against the baseline (1000 = a mid-range 2021 laptop) and a letter grade. A profile-weighted geometric mean of CPU, memory and disk becomes one overall grade, with a plain-language note on what moved it. Network is shown alongside — it's more about your OS than your hardware — so it doesn't skew the grade.
loadbearer compare a.json b.json reads the raw metrics
from two runs and says: "dev-desktop leads by 68% overall (ahead on
cpu +90%, memory +55%, network +60%)." Baseline-independent, so it
holds even across tool versions.
Fixed-time throughput measurement, medians with confidence flags from run-to-run spread, geometric means throughout, and a documented baseline you can regenerate from your own hardware. No hidden weighting — it's a few constants in the source.
One static binary, no runtime. No network calls — the network test is
loopback only. Disk reads bypass the OS page cache
(O_DIRECT / FILE_FLAG_NO_BUFFERING). Workloads
are reproducible with --seed.
An interactive run shows a live TUI; piped or scripted, it's plain text or JSON. Here's the plain output.
loadbearer 0.2.1 — compare (2 machines)
A ThinkPad-X280 Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8350U
B dev-desktop AMD Ryzen 9 7900X
metric A: ThinkPad-X2… B: dev-desktop
CPU
Integer, all cores (Mops/s) 37305 70879 +90% B
BLAKE3 hash (MiB/s) 3563 6769 +90% B
→ component ref +90% B
MEMORY
Sequential read (GiB/s) 13.1 20.2 +55% B
Random access latency (ns) 136.7 88.2 +55% B
→ component ref +55% B
NETWORK
TCP round-trip latency (us) 19.8 12.4 +60% B
→ component ref +60% B
OVERALL ref +68% B
Verdict: dev-desktop leads by 68% overall
(ahead on cpu +90%, memory +55%, network +60%).
loadbearer 0.2.1 — machine inventory Host Hostname ThinkPad-X280 OS Linux (Ubuntu 26.04) Architecture x86_64 CPU Model Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-8350U CPU @ 1.70GHz Cores 4 physical / 8 logical Memory RAM 7.0 GiB Disks / ext4 SSD 232.6 GiB total, 47.3 GiB free
loadbearer — running elapsed 0:41 CPU Integer, single-core ██████████ done 9153 Mops/s ✓ Integer, all cores ██████████ done 36932 Mops/s ✓ Float, single-core ██████░░░░ 3/5 7101 MFLOP/s Float, all cores ░░░░░░░░░░ Memory Sequential read ░░░░░░░░░░ Disk Sequential write ░░░░░░░░░░ ████████░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 38% · elapsed 0:41 · eta 1:06 q quit
$ loadbearer run # grade this machine (TUI) $ loadbearer run --output me.json # ...and save the result $ loadbearer compare me.json them.json # which machine wins, and why $ loadbearer run --json | jq .overall # for scripts and CI gates $ loadbearer run --only cpu,memory # skip the disk write $ loadbearer baseline runs/*.json > ref.toml # recalibrate to your fleet
Profiles (--profile dev-workstation, content-creation,
server) reweight the components for a workload. A real link test
between two machines: loadbearer net-server on one,
loadbearer run --net-target HOST:PORT on the other.
Every tagged release ships a self-contained loadbearer.exe
for Windows and a Linux tarball, built from
the same source by CI.
Unzip and run loadbearer.exe from a terminal. Unsigned,
so SmartScreen shows an "unrecognized app" warning the first time —
More info → Run anyway.
Extract the tarball and run ./loadbearer, or install from
source:
cargo install --git https://github.com/issinoho/loadbearer --lockedDownload .tar.gz
Needs a recent stable Rust toolchain. For CPU kernels that use your machine's widest vectors:
RUSTFLAGS="-C target-cpu=native" \ cargo build --releaseBuild guide
Full flag reference is in the
README; the
wiki is the deep
dive — every benchmark kernel, the scoring maths worked through,
compare internals, and recalibrating the baseline.