Filesystem benchmarks

[Christopher Chan]

>>>I don't know how many people have seen this but it may be of interest or 
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>>>Benchmarking Filesystems
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>>>This article covers ext2, ext3, JFS, REISERFS and XFS.
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>>A far more interesting one can be found at 
>>http://untroubled.org/benchmarking/2004-04/
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>>which simulates real world conditions for mta boxes with recent kernels 
>>and not with a kernel that is not going to receive much attention anymore.
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> yes it does look more interesting:
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>     "Benchmark Goals
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>     "The goal of this set of benchmarks is to determine which of the
>     leading Linux filesystems (ext2, ext3, ReiserFS, and XFS) offer the
>     best performance when used for accepting maildir deliveries. The
>     resulting system should be a good balance of delivery and retrieval
>     performance under potentially high concurrent filesystem load."
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> This is interesting because it addresses a real and specific
> use of a filesystem.   If your usage pattern is different
> then a different data set needs to be generated.
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> It is a good example of measure the need and shape the benchmark to
> match.  Most vendor driven benchmarks focus on what they do well not
> on what you need them to do well ;-)
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>>Add to that that things have changed so much in 2.6 from 2.4 that fs 
>>code is substantially different. eg: XFS in 2.4 is different from XFS in 2.6
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> Yes...
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> And with a quick look the benchmark seems to make some simplifying
> assumptions that may or may not match your application needs.  He also
> did not report or tune any of the file systems mkfs params.

You can download the fsbench tarball. All the options used for mkfs will 
be found in the dir prepfs in the file of the appropriate name for the 
fs mode.
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> For example in the mke2fs man page: If omitted, mke2fs block- size is
> hueristically determined by the file system size and the expected
> usage of the filesystem (see the -T option)."  So we do not know
> exactly how his ext3 filesystems (and others) were tuned.  The
> hueristics could be researched and we could discover the resulting
> parameters but at this moment we do not exactly know.

Please check out the fsbench tarball. You are provided full details and 
the necessary scripts to run it yourself.

eg:

cat fsbench/prepfs/ext3o
mkfs="mke2fs -j -J size=400 -i 8192"
fs="ext3 -o noatime,data=ordered"

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> To his credit he clearly exposes his method, data and goals.
> Very good stuff!
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and gives the stuff needed to run the exact same thing too.