Disk Performance Benchmarking

[Kenny Lussier]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2008 at 1:15 PM, Paul Lussier <p.lussier at comcast.net> wrote:
> "Kenny Lussier" <klussier at gmail.com> writes:
>
>  > Hi All,
>  >
>  > I am looking for a tool that will centrally test the performance of
>  > several disk sub-systems in my environment.
>
>  bonnie++, iozone, countless others.
>
>  There's a decent performance test tool matrix here:
>   http://ltp.sourceforge.net/tooltable.php

Thanks. I sent that to the guys that are looking at tools. They are
happy to see that there are tools more recent then IOMeter. The thing
that they really liked about IOMeter was that they had a Windows app
that allowed them to centrally control the testing on a bunch of
servers. It's nice functionality, allbeit on Windows.

>  Be sure to look at all the tools and determine exactly what
>  information you're trying to determine.  Iow, what questions do you
>  want answered.

We will probably end up using a mix of tools, both commercial and OSS
to get all of the info that we need.

>  "Disk performance" will vary depending upon application, use, speed of
>  drive, buffering, caching, file system layouts, etc.
>
>  The same disk (disk system) can perform very differently under the
>  same load by simply changing the file system.  Raw disk will perform
>  very differently than one with any type of file system, etc.

We have noticed that the same disk system seens to perform differently
depending on the box that is connectiong to it (iSCSI SAN), too. Which
is, I believe, what prompted the interest in performance testing. I
think they are looking to find where the bottleneck is on certain
systems as opposed to other systems that are supposed to be doing the
same thing.

C-Ya,
Kenny