Re: [Jfs-discussion] benchmark results

Evgeniy Polyakov
2009-12-24T23:46:31Z

Hi Ted.

On Thu, Dec 24, 2009 at 04:27:56PM -0500, tytso@mit.edu (tytso@mit.edu) wrote:
> > Unfortunately there seems to be an overproduction of rather
> > meaningless file system "benchmarks"...
>
> One of the problems is that very few people are interested in writing
> or maintaining file system benchmarks, except for file system
> developers --- but many of them are more interested in developing (and
> unfortunately, in some cases, promoting) their file systems than they
> are in doing a good job maintaining a good set of benchmarks. Sad but
> true...

Hmmmm.... I suppose here should be a link to such set? :)
No link? Than I suppose benchmark results are pretty much in sync with
what they are supposed to show.

> > * In the "generic" test the 'tar' test bandwidth is exactly the
> > same ("276.68 MB/s") for nearly all filesystems.
> >
> > * There are read transfer rates higher than the one reported by
> > 'hdparm' which is "66.23 MB/sec" (comically enough *all* the
> > read transfer rates your "benchmarks" report are higher).
>
> If you don't do a "sync" after the tar, then in most cases you will be
> measuring the memory bandwidth, because data won't have been written
> to disk. Worse yet, it tends to skew the results of the what happens
> afterwards (*especially* if you aren't running the steps of the
> benchmark in a script).

It depends on the size of untarred object, for linux kernel tarball and
common several gigs of RAM it is very valid not to run a sync after the
tar, since writeback will take care about it.

> > BTW the use of Bonnie++ is also usually a symptom of a poor
> > misunderstanding of file system benchmarking.
>
> Dbench is also a really nasty benchmark. If it's tuned correctly, you
> are measuring memory bandwidth and the hard drive light will never go
> on. :-) The main reason why it was interesting was that it and tbench
> was used to model a really bad industry benchmark, netbench, which at
> one point a number of years ago I/T managers used to decide which CIFS
> server they would buy[1]. So it was useful for Samba developers who were
> trying to do competitive benchmkars, but it's not a very accurate
> benchmark for measuring real-life file system workloads.
>
> [1] http://samba.org/ftp/tridge/dbench/README

Was not able to resist to write a small notice, what no matter what, but
whatever benchmark is running, it _does_ show system behaviour in one
or another condition. And when system behaves rather badly, it is quite
a common comment, that benchmark was useless. But it did show that
system has a problem, even if rarely triggered one :)

Not an ext4 nitpick of course.

--
Evgeniy Polyakov