Disk Performance Benchmarking in Linux

This page is a dump of notes on disk benchmarking in Linux, and is in great need of editing! Use at own peril.

  • http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/postgresql/pg-disktesting.htm
  • http://archive09.linux.com/feature/139742

hdparm

Buffered disk reads (bypasses cache)

This method reads data sequentially from the disk, disregarding file boundaries.

mariosz@super-mario:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
 Timing buffered disk reads: 228 MB in  3.02 seconds =  75.52 MB/sec

Cached reads

mariosz@super-mario:~$ sudo hdparm -T /dev/sdb
/dev/sdb:
 Timing cached reads:   3158 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1579.16 MB/sec

dd

Writes

mariosz@super-mario:~$ dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=8k count=100k; rm -f testfile
102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
838860800 bytes (839 MB) copied, 12.7363 s, 65.9 MB/s

Writes and Cache-out

mariosz@super-mario:~$ time sh -c "dd if=/dev/zero of=testfile bs=8k count=100k; sync" ; rm -f testfile
102400+0 records in
102400+0 records out
838860800 bytes (839 MB) copied, 12.6832 s, 66.1 MB/s
real    0m19.304s
user    0m0.020s
sys 0m1.232s

Install iozone

  1. Go to [http://www.iozone.org/], get link of latest build.
  2. wget http://www.iozone.org/src/current/iozone-3-420.i386.rpm
  3. yum install iozone-3-420.i386.rpm

If you also need to create graphs from the results of iozone, you can additionally install gnuplot:

yum install gnuplot

Using iozone

  • [http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2011/05/iozone-examples/]

Bonnie++

The bonnie++ benchmark is available on EPEL repository for CentOS. Note that it will put load on the system on which it runs, so it's better run during less productive times.

[root@centos-6-3-minimal ~]# bonnie++ -u root

Bonnie++ will output its data twice, once in an ASCII formatted table, and once more in a single line CSV. Echo the contents of the CSV line through bon_csv2html to get a more readable HTML table.

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