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