I appreciate the effort, but those are far from what i'm looking for.
How would somebody simulate the block size for blocks received by Bitcoin Core to perform these tests though? The blocks are either 1MB or 4 weight units in size so it involves running it in regtest and submitting your own blocks en masse, and then you have to fork Core and change the code to allow for bigger size limits.
Roughly this is what i had in mind,
1. Prepare separate network (with specific block weight)
2. Prepare few fast computer solely to broadcast transaction & mine block
3. Prepare few cheap/low-powered/old computer (e.g. Raspberry Pi and old Intel NUC) used to perform benchmark.
4. On fast computer, perform mining block and broadcast transaction (match block size limit)
5. Measure time to verify block/transaction and CPU, RAM and I/O usage on other computer.
And by the way I think that it makes more sense to benchmark resource usage in WUs instead of megabytes since new versions of the client doesn't have a concept of megabyte-denominated block size.
I agree.