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I want to test the performance of a filesystem under different conditions.

Specifically I want to test the performance of Windows virtual machines without compression and with compression both on "normal harddisk" and on USB-disk as it would be interesting to see exactly what the difference is.

What I need is a program that can test different aspects of filesystem (random access, sequential read/write, etc) and make pretty graphs that go well with my blog. Preferrably the application should be automated so I can add it to startup, this way the timing is the same for each run and I can repeat the runs for verification.

I can post a link to the results here when I get around to testing it. Right now its just in the planning phase.

Cody Gray - on strike
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Tedd Hansen
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    Compression will be noticeably slower. Skip the tests, unless you really like graphs and pretty pictures. – Cody Gray - on strike Jan 13 '11 at 12:31
  • @Cody Gray this is not exactly true and depends on the disk type and filesystem itself. – Eugene Mayevski 'Callback Jan 13 '11 at 12:45
  • @Eugene: Yeah, a compressed file on an SSD will be faster than a compressed file on a floppy disk. But all else being equal, the overhead of *decompression* will cause that file system to be slower every time. – Cody Gray - on strike Jan 13 '11 at 12:48
  • @Cody what *else being equal* are you talking about? My point is that the difference ratio (between compressed and uncompressed) on SSD will be different from the ratio on shared network drive. – Eugene Mayevski 'Callback Jan 13 '11 at 13:37
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    I don't agree - mem/cpu-time is considerably lower than disk time so for a defragmented disk I'd expect compression to speed things up. I'm interested in seeing the actual difference. One of the biggest bottlenecks on a (low-end) server with 2-3 virtual machines is the disk. – Tedd Hansen Jan 13 '11 at 14:35
  • Here is a tool written in java. It has graphs! https://sourceforge.net/projects/jdiskmark/ – simgineer Jul 09 '18 at 06:37

3 Answers3

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Iometer is the I/O measurement tool. And it's free. From the website:

Iometer is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It was originally developed by the Intel Corporation and announced at the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) on February 17, 1998 - since then it got wide spread within the industry.

Meanwhile Intel has discontinued to work on Iometer and it was given to the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). In November 2001, a project was registered at SourceForge.net and an initial drop was provided. Since the relaunch in February 2003, the project is driven by an international group of individuals who are continuesly improving, porting and extend the product.

The tool (Iometer and Dynamo executable) is distributed under the terms of the Intel Open Source License. The iomtr_kstat kernel module as well as other future independent components are distributed under the terms of the GNU Public License.

Helge Klein
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    I'm not too impressed by the supported platforms, windows up to XP and no support for mac. Is there an updated support matrix other than: http://www.iometer.org/doc/matrix.html ? – Pimin Konstantin Kefaloukos Jun 20 '12 at 12:00
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You said you'd like pretty graphs for your blog. In my use of IOMeter, I've never seen it produce a graph. However, it is possible that I overlooked an existing feature.

Alternatively, (from the look of its website) iozone might give you graphs: http://www.iozone.org/

Yet, it could be that iozone only collected the data used to create those graphs shown on its web site.

Regardless, this is still another option for I/O Benchmarking.

Lonnie Best
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Additional server oriented disk benchmarks:

Anon
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