Benchmarking (in computing field) has mostly to do with performance comparisons. There is a whole suite of perl modules Benchmark and Benchmark::Harness, neither of which have I used. I did work for several years on Spec95 Benchmarks and at the BYTE Magazine Lab. I don't know if you are looking for performance evaluation, but if you are, I'm passing on these experiences:

• Perl is great "harness" for doing benchmarks. The SPEC 95 benchmarks are all (and there are many) run from a quite sophisticated Perl testing application. The BYTE Unix benchmarks (which have survived longer than the actual magazine) were writen prior to Perl, had a harness using various UNIX utilities, all of which are part of Perl. I believe they were eventually migrated to a Perl "harness."
• The forking of a new processes is a significant part of the starting of an application or test. One very good way to test an application that doesn't include the desireable: is to use the system time (1) command/utility.

In this later case, I would use a Perl invocation like this:

my $results = system("time $program_to_time");
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And parse the results.

Not sure if any of this is of any interest to you. If so, I'll dig up what I can. -ben

P.S., Those SPEC95 benchmarks were a real pain, from which I learned: a whole lot about Perl and the fundemetal difference between UNIX and VMS.