Disk benchmarking

In this recipe, we will be discussing how to benchmark the disk speed using open source tools.

Getting ready

The well-known command to perform disk I/O benchmarking is dd. We all use the dd command to measure read/write operations by specifying the required block size, and we also measure the direct I/O by skipping the system write buffers. Similarly, phoronix supports a complete test suite for the disk as CPU and memory that perform different storage-related tests. Another famous disk benchmarking tool is bonnie++, which provides more flexibility in measuring the disk I/O.

How to do it...

Let us discuss how to run the disk benchmarking using phoronix and using bonnie++ testing tools:

Phoronix

To run the complete disk test suite on the system, run the following command:

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark pts/disk

Phoronix also supports a quick I/O test case, where you can perform an instant disk performance test using the following command test, which is interactive and collects the input, and then runs the test cases:

$ phoronix-test-suite benchmark pts/iozone
Phoronix Test Suite v6.8.0
    Installed: pts/iozone-1.8.0
Disk Test Configuration
        1: 4Kb
        2: 64Kb
        3: 1MB
        4: Test All Options
        Record Size: 1
      1: 512MB
    2: 2GB
    3: 4GB
    4: 8GB
    5: Test All Options
    File Size: 1
    1: Write Performance
    2: Read Performance
    3: Test All Options
    Disk Test: 3

bonnie++

bonnie++ is a filesystem and disk-level benchmarking tool and can perform the same test multiple times. You can install this tool using either yum or apt-get install or installing it via the source code. Let's run the bulk I/O test case using the following arguments, where it tries to create 8 GB files:

$ /usr/local/sbin/bonnie++ -D -d /tmp/ -s 8G -b
Writing with putc()...done
Writing intelligently...done
...
localhost.localdomain,8G,68996,106,14151,53,46772,15,95343,93,123633,16,201.0,7,16,795,58,+++++,+++,733,46,757,57,+++++,+++,592,38

How it works...

Let us discuss how the bonnie++ performs the benchmarking, and what are all the tools bonnie++ offers to understand the benchmarking results:

bonnie++

From the preceding test case, we provided the results the bonnie++ as to use only direct I/O using the -D option. Also, we asked to create 8 GB random files in the /tmp/ location to measure the disk speed. As the final output from bonnie++, we will get CSV values, which we need to feed to the bon_csv2html command, which provides some detailed information about the test results, as shown in the following screenshot:

$ echo "localhost.localdomain,8G,68996,106,14151,53,46772,15,95343,93,123633,16,201.0,7,16,795,58,+++++,+++,733,46,757,57,+++++,+++,592,38"|bon_csv2html > ~/Desktop/bonresults.html

bonnie++ performs three different tests for disk benchmarking. They are read, write and then seek speed. We will be discussing the seek rate in the further topics. The bonnie++ do always recommend to have high number in /sec section in the preceding table, and lower % CPU values for better disk performance. Also, ++++ shows that the test was not performed accurately by bonnie++, as the test was incomplete with the provided arguments. To get the complete results, we need to rerun the same test multiple times using the -n option, where bonnie will get enough time/resources to complete the job.