I Feel the Need for Speed: Linux File System Throughput Performance, Part 1

"In two previous articles (here and here) we explored the metadata performance of a number of Linux file systems using a single micro-benchmark: fdtree.

"fdtree as a micro-benchmark is very attractive because it is a simple bash script that uses recursion, forcing all cores to be used (extremely important with modern processors). It tests the ability of the file system to simply create directories and files in a tree-structure. The file systems tested typically used their default options (except for ext3 and ext4) so tuning the file systems for this specific benchmark was not tested.

"This article shifts from looking at metadata performance to examining data performance (sometimes referred to as throughput). However, we'll start slow by first looking at one fairly common micro-benchmark: IOzone. IOzone is a generally well-known and useful benchmark used to test data throughput and features a number of data access patterns and tuning options. The access patterns follow a range of applications and can be very useful for finding hotspots or bottlenecks even on deployed solutions."

Complete Story

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