Solaris - IO benchmarking - vdbench

do you want to measure performance of disks on solaris ?. then we have excellent tool called vdbench.

Initially I used to write c++ program which read/writes chunks of data and measure the Input/Output using iostat command. then i came across called vdbench which simulates read/write on given partition of hard disk .

go to http://sourceforge.net/projects/vdbench/ to download the tool and unzip it. 

1) create a file of 100 MB . $mkfile 100m /benchmark/file1 

2)now lets generate read/writes on this file /benchmark/file1 which is mounted on partition you want to benchmark IO. 

there are example files that come with installation like example1, example2 etc. we can edit example1 file ,

*Example 1: Single run, one raw disk

*SD:    Storage Definition

*WD:    Workload Definition

*RD:    Run Definition

*

sd=sd1,lun=/benchmark/file1

wd=wd1,sd=sd1,xfersize=4194304,rdpct=50

rd=run1,wd=wd1,iorate=100,elapsed=10,interval=1

* lun specifies the file, rawdisks etc.

*rdpct means read percentage. here i gave rdpct=50 means read % is 50, write % is 50. 

*xfersize is 4194304 bytes which means vdbench generates 4 MB of load. 

*elapsed is how many samples we need . we get 10 samples here 

3) issue the command $ vdbench -f example1 

Apr 20, 2012  interval        i/o   MB/sec   bytes   read     resp     resp     resp    cpu%  cpu%
                             rate  1024**2     i/o    pct     time      max   stddev sys+usr   sys
07:25:53.061         1      92.00  1559.74 4194304  53.26   13.379   26.133    2.459     2.1   2.0
07:25:54.021         2     108.00  1831.00 4194304  50.00   12.848   16.296    1.704     2.5   2.3
07:25:55.019         3     114.00  1932.72 4194304  54.39   12.824   24.141    2.158     2.5   2.4
07:25:56.018         4      93.00  1576.69 4194304  46.24   12.893   27.468    2.312     2.1   2.0
07:25:57.017         5     103.00  1746.23 4194304  52.43   12.491   15.294    1.514     2.2   2.1
07:25:58.016         6     118.00  2000.53 4194304  43.22   13.324   30.540    2.848     2.7   2.5
07:25:59.018         7     103.00  1746.23 4194304  44.66   12.661   16.723    1.527     2.2   2.1
07:26:00.016         8     102.00  1729.27 4194304  44.12   12.657   15.030    1.419     2.2   2.1
07:26:01.016         9     116.00  1966.63 4194304  45.69   12.635   16.636    1.483     2.5   2.5
07:26:02.019        10      90.00  1525.83 4194304  47.78   12.499   14.357    1.419     1.9   1.8
07:26:02.026  avg_2-10     105.22  1783.90 4194304  47.62   12.770   30.540    1.908     2.3   2.2
07:26:02.489 Vdbench execution completed successfully

the last line avg_2-10 is avg of all samples.

for 4mb read/writes here the response time is 12 secs. cpu usage is 2.3%