NOTE: Many of the answers to these questions were derived from articles posted to comp.benchmarks throughout the years. I have generally made no effort to attribute them to their sources because I didn't have time to get everyone's approval--or even the time to include the attributions :-). If you recognize something you wrote and you'd like it attributed, let me know.]

CONTENTS
 SECTION 1 - General Q/A
1.1.  What is comp.benchmarks?
1.2.  What is a benchmark?
1.3.  How are benchmarks used?
1.4.  What kinds of performance do benchmarks measure?
1.5.  What are all these strange messages from Eugene Miya?
1.6.  What are the most common benchmarks?
1.7.  Where can I get benchmark results and source code?
1.8.  How can one safely interpret benchmark results?
1.9.  What are the pitfalls involved with running benchmarks?

 SECTION 2 - Common Benchmarks
2.1. 007 (ODBMS)
2.2. AIM
2.3. Dhrystone
2.4. Khornerstone
2.5. LFK (Livermore Loops)
2.6. LINPACK
2.7. MUSBUS
2.8. NAS Kernels
2.9. Nhfsstone
2.10. PERFECT
2.11. RhosettaStone
2.12. SLALOM
2.13. SPEC
2.14. SSBA
2.15. Sieve of Eratosthenes
2.16. TPC
2.17. WPI Benchmark Suite
2.18. Whetstone
2.19. Xstone
2.20. bc
2.21. SYSmark
2.22. Stanford
2.23. Bonnie
2.24. IOBENCH
2.25. IOZONE
2.26. Byte
2.27. Netperf
2.28. Nettest
2.29. ttcp
2.30. CPU2
2.31. Hartstone
2.32. EuroBen
2.33. PC Bench/WinBench/NetBench
2.34. Sim
2.35. Fhourstones
2.36. Heapsort
2.37. Hanoi
2.38. Flops
2.39. C LINPACK
2.40. TFFTDP
2.41. Matrix Multiply (MM)
2.42. Digital Review
2.43. Nullstone
2.44. Rendermark
2.45. Bench++
2.46. Stream

 SECTION 3 - Terminology
3.1.  Configuration
3.2.  MFLOPS
3.3.  MIPS
3.4.  Representative
3.5.  Single Figure of Merit
3.6.  KAP

 SECTION 4 - Other Sources of Information
4.1.  WORLD WIDE WEB
4.2.  FTP
4.3.  COMMERCIAL BENCHMARKS
4.4.  PUBLICATIONS
4.5.  OTHER NETWORK SERVICES