Experiments with general cubic surfaces

Dedicated to Yuri Ivanovich Manin on the occasion of his 70th birthday Summary. For general cubic surfaces, we test numerically the conjecture of Manin (in the refined form due to E. Peyre) about the asymptotics of points of bounded height on Fano varieties. We also study the behaviour of the height of the smallest rational point versus the Tamagawa type number introduced by Peyre.