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Benchmark using iometer on linux

There are plenty of software for testing harddisk performance. However, the focus is mainly on read and write performance, and are usually targeted at desktop users. For web, mail and database servers, the requirement is for high random read write IOPs rather than sequential read or sequential write.

On that basis, iometer is one of the few tools suitable for benchmarking a harddisk for use on a server. Using iometer on windows is straight forward, but on linux, there are a few obstacles to go through.

Following are my observations, and steps to follow in using iometer on linux; on a fresh CentOS installation. I am particularly interested in testing the Intel X25-E and X25-M SSDs on iometer. Intel quotes 4KB results based on "8 GB span", and "up to"; which does not gives a picture of what the sustained IOPs are. I am exploring using those SSDs in servers, particularly for VPS servers, so finding out the performance of the Intel SSDs vs SCSI is important for Xssist.

In various versions, eg. 2006 version, iometer uses O_DIRECT. Yet, on others, the O_DIRECT option is missing. It appears use of O_DIRECT will not allow queue depth more than 1 per dynamo process. It is possible to set queue depth in the iometer GUI, but the actual run will be limited to queue depth 1; your mileage may vary, confirm the queue depth with iostat.

The latest available iometer on sourceforge, iometer-2008-06-22-rc2.src.tgz, does not use O_DIRECT, grep of the source code does not show usage of O_DIRECT.

However, without O_DIRECT, I could not get dynamo to produce write IOPS while doing random 4KB RW tests, there is read IOPS but very minimal write IOPS, when monitored using iostat.

What I do to work around the problem is to use the source with O_DIRECT, and open multiple dynamo processes to generate higher queue depth.

Steps for using iometer,
  1. to download source from http://sourceforge.net/projects/iometer/
  2. rename the Makefile with suitable extension to makefile
    eg. mv Makefile-Linux.x86_64 makefile
  3. make dynamo
  4. disable iptables
  5. download windows version to a pc. run iometer on the pc
  6. run dynamo on the linux server

    [root@bench src]# ./dynamo -i 192.168.1.7 -m 192.168.1.2

    where 192.168.1.7 is the IP of the pc running iometer. 192.168.1.2 is IP of the server running dynamo
If all goes well, you will see the following,

example of output from dynamo of a correct startup

[root@bench src]# ./dynamo -i 192.168.1.7 -m 192.168.1.2
Fail to open kstat device file. You can ignore this warning unless you are running dynamo on XSCALE CPU.

Command line parameter(s):
Looking for Iometer on "192.168.1.7"

Sending login request...
bench.xssist.com
192.168.1.2 (port 33839)
Successful PortTCP::Connect
- port name: 192.168.1.7

*** If dynamo and iometer hangs here, please make sure
*** you use a correct -m <manager_computer_name> that
*** can ping from iometer machine. use IP if need.
Login accepted.
Reporting drive information...
Set_Sizes: Open on "/sys/iobw.tst" failed (error Permission denied).
Set_Sizes: Open on "/dev/shm/iobw.tst" failed (error Invalid argument).
Set_Sizes: Open on "/proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc/iobw.tst" failed (error Permission denied).
Set_Sizes: Open on "/var/lib/nfs/rpc_pipefs/iobw.tst" failed (error Permission denied).
Physical drives (raw devices)...
Reporting TCP network information...
done.

Mar 2010

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