IOStone: A Synthetic File System Performance Benchmark

Abstract:

We have developed a portable benchmark program which measures file system performance on typical system loads. Our program accomplishes this by generating a string of file system requests which is representative of measured system loads. Instead of isolating a particular aspect of file system performance such as disk access speed, or channel bandwidth, our program measures performance of the entire file system which includes components of disk performance, CPU performance on file system tasks, and buffer cache performance. This single metric can act as a valuable comprehensive measure of file system performance. Measurements that we have made indicate that the balance between CPU performance and file system performance varies greatly across different computer systems. If an optimal balance between these two capabilities exists few system actually achieve this.