In the process of trying to figure out my VM performance problems, I’ve been doing a lot of filesystem benchmarking. Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of consistency between platforms or machine classes as to benchmarking methodology, so I’ve had some trouble generating comparable numbers. However, I’ve gotten the solaris filebench suite running on linux, and bonnie++ running on solaris, so I can now generate comparable numbers across both platforms.
One of my primary interests is the throughput I can get out of the 3ware 7506 raid controller in my unix nas box, both in order to optimize it and in order to compare to other solutions and determine if they will actually be an upgrade or not. In the process, I’ve been benchmarking an older Dell Precision Workstation 420. It has 4 wd1200jb drives plugged into its onboard IDE boards (yes, they are sharing ide channels), and is currently running opensolaris nv47. I played around with a few different ZFS configurations, but eventually settled on raidz, leaving me with 360G usable disk space. Here’s some of the numbers I got:
Filebench Benchmarks
Webserver IO Summary: 848559 ops 16865.4 ops/s, (5440/544 r/w) 91.8mb/s, 249us cpu/op, 0.3ms latency
Varmail IO Summary: 96110 ops 1913.1 ops/s, (294/295 r/w) 9.6mb/s, 618us cpu/op, 26.1ms latency
Fileserver IO Summary: 8000 ops 3964.1 ops/s, (497/493 r/w) 72.8mb/s, 1130us cpu/op, 0.9ms latency
Here are some benchmarks from my production file server, at a low load time but nonetheless serving vmdk images for 8 virtual machines. It is a 2x P4 Xeon 2.4ghz ,3GB RAM, 3ware 7506 controller with raid5 x 5 + 1 hotswap WD1200JB PATA disks.
Varmail IO Summary: 87754 ops 1454.5 ops/s, (224/224 r/w) 7.3mb/s, 142us cpu/op, 35.5ms latency
Webserver IO Summary: 20312 ops 20208.2 ops/s, (6499/660 r/w) 108.4mb/s, 215us cpu/op, 0.7ms latency
Fileserver IO Summary: 7997 ops 1587.9 ops/s, (202/196 r/w) 29.8mb/s, 1122us cpu/op, 37.8ms latency