# The Benchmarking CLI
This crate contains commands to benchmark various aspects of Substrate and the hardware.
All commands are exposed by the Substrate node but can be exposed by any Substrate client.
The goal is to have a comprehensive suite of benchmarks that cover all aspects of Substrate and the hardware that its
running on.
Invoking the root benchmark command prints a help menu:
```sh
$ cargo run --profile=production -- benchmark
Sub-commands concerned with benchmarking.
USAGE:
substrate benchmark <SUBCOMMAND>
OPTIONS:
-h, --help Print help information
-V, --version Print version information
SUBCOMMANDS:
block Benchmark the execution time of historic blocks
machine Command to benchmark the hardware.
overhead Benchmark the execution overhead per-block and per-extrinsic
pallet Benchmark the extrinsic weight of FRAME Pallets
storage Benchmark the storage speed of a chain snapshot
```
All examples use the `production` profile for correctness which makes the compilation *very* slow; for testing you can
use `--release`.
For the final results the `production` profile and reference hardware should be used, otherwise the results are not
comparable.
The sub-commands are explained in depth here:
- [block] Compare the weight of a historic block to its actual resource usage
- [machine] Gauges the speed of the hardware
- [overhead] Creates weight files for the *Block*- and *Extrinsic*-base weights
- [pallet] Creates weight files for a Pallet
- [storage] Creates weight files for *Read* and *Write* storage operations
License: Apache-2.0
[pallet]: ../../../frame/benchmarking/README.md
[machine]: src/machine/README.md
[storage]: src/storage/README.md
[overhead]: src/overhead/README.md
[block]: src/block/README.md