[Novalug] bonnie benchmarking

[Megan Larko]

Matt Bidwell wrote:

Howdy Matt,

> 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.
> 
I've heard of XFS and used it on IRIX systems.  I could consider it but 
I hear that ZFS and ext4 are supposed to handle larger single "disk" 
namespace.   Part of the reason for the benchmark work is to see if XFS 
could be better performance-wise than any of the others.   Does any one 
of these file systems stand out in performance on large, usually binary, 
files that we work with here.

I'm open to suggestions.

megan
> Matt