[Novalug] bonnie benchmarking

[Matt Bidwell]

Megan Larko wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I would like to get some benchmarks on my filesystem on my work 
> computer.  It is a 16-slot JBOD with an LSI edge card.  The drives in 
> the 16 bays are all sATA Hitachi Ultrastar 1Tb units.   I used parted to 
> partition them.   I used mke2fs -j -T largefile -m 1 for one group of 
> drives passed to the CentOS 5 system.   The other group of drives I did 
> the same mke2fs but with out the -T largefile option.   Using 8 drives 
> each, the size formatted was 5.4Tb and 5.5Tb respectively.  I am 
> wondering about the performance of the set-up.  How does this new LSI 
> edge card compare with the internal Sil cards in the other boxes?  Does 
> the "largefile" option make any difference?     I may even scrap the 
> 5.4Tb ext3 and try the experimental ext4 or ZFS file system. 
> I am leaning toward using bonnie for this to get some numbers to compare 
> amongst file systems on the same disks (which will hopefully have some 
> meaning).
> 
> Is there a good bonnie HOWTO out there.  My searches didn't come up with 
> much in the way of usage of bonnie, only benchmark results done by 
> others.  What would be good arguments to supply to the test?
> 
> Thanks group!
> megan

Sorry I don't have an answer, but I do have a question.
Why ext3 and not XFS?  From my limited experience it
seems to be the best large file system for Linux.

Matt