Using iozone to benchmark disk io

We downloaded the iozone source code, and now we need to compile it.  One can see the supported architectures by typing “make”.

[root@computer current]# make

You must specify the target.
-> AIX (32bit) <- -> AIX-LF (32bit) <- -> bsdi (32bit) <- -> convex (32bit) <- -> CrayX1 (32bit) <- -> dragonfly (32bit) <- -> freebsd (32bit) <- -> generic (32bit) <- -> ghpux (32bit) <- -> hpuxs-11.0 (simple) (32bit) <- -> hpux-11.0w (64bit) <- -> hpuxs-11.0w (64bit) <- -> hpux-11.0 (32bit) <- -> hpux-10.1 (32bit) <- -> hpux-10.20 (32bit) <- -> hpux (32bit) <- -> hpux_no_ansi (32bit) <- -> hpux_no_ansi-10.1 (32bit) <- -> IRIX (32bit) <- -> IRIX64 (64bit) <- -> linux (32bit) <- -> linux-arm (32bit) <- -> linux-AMD64 (64bit) <- -> linux-ia64 (64bit) <- -> linux-powerpc (32bit) <- -> linux-powerpc64 (64bit) <- -> linux-sparc (32bit) <- -> macosx (32bit) <- -> netbsd (32bit) <- -> openbsd (32bit) <- -> openbsd-threads (32bit) <- -> OSFV3 (64bit) <- -> OSFV4 (64bit) <- -> OSFV5 (64bit) <- -> linux-S390 (32bit) <- -> linux-S390X (64bit) <- -> SCO (32bit) <- -> SCO_Unixware_gcc (32bit) <- -> Solaris (32bit) <- -> Solaris-2.6 (32bit) <- -> Solaris7gcc (32bit) <- -> Solaris8-64 (64bit) <- -> Solaris8-64-VXFS (64bit) <- -> Solaris10 (32bit) <- -> Solaris10cc (64bit) <- -> Solaris10gcc (32bit) <- -> Solaris10gcc-64 (64bit) <- -> sppux (32bit) <- -> sppux-10.1 (32bit) <- -> sppux_no_ansi-10.1 (32bit) <- -> SUA (32bit) <- -> TRU64 (64bit) <- -> UWIN (32bit) <- -> Windows (95/98/NT) (32bit) <- In our case, this is linux, 32 bit, so we can just perform the command as follows

make linux

Now we can utilize the iozone tool to benchmark our disk. For a full list of options you can do

iozone -h

A good way to use the tool is to just put it in auto mode. To invoke this do

iozone -A

This will start from smaller tests with trimmed down output and work its way up to larger, more challenging tests for your system. It will provide a great range of disk io tests that you can analyze.

[root@computer current]# ./iozone -A
        Iozone: Performance Test of File I/O
                Version $Revision: 3.373 $
                Compiled for 32 bit mode.
                Build: linux

        Contributors:William Norcott, Don Capps, Isom Crawford, Kirby Collins
                     Al Slater, Scott Rhine, Mike Wisner, Ken Goss
                     Steve Landherr, Brad Smith, Mark Kelly, Dr. Alain CYR,
                     Randy Dunlap, Mark Montague, Dan Million, Gavin Brebner,
                     Jean-Marc Zucconi, Jeff Blomberg, Benny Halevy, Dave Boone,
                     Erik Habbinga, Kris Strecker, Walter Wong, Joshua Root,
                     Fabrice Bacchella, Zhenghua Xue, Qin Li, Darren Sawyer.

        Run began: Wed Feb 23 15:54:17 2011

        Auto Mode 2. This option is obsolete. Use -az -i0 -i1
        Command line used: ./iozone -A
        Output is in Kbytes/sec
        Time Resolution = 0.000001 seconds.
        Processor cache size set to 1024 Kbytes.
        Processor cache line size set to 32 bytes.
        File stride size set to 17 * record size.

              KB  reclen   write rewrite    read    reread
              64       4  621935 1390480  2204914  5756661
              64       8  516038 1162456  2920550  7175463
              64      16  674016  928321  3789274  8005173
              64      32  736491 1687630  5305905  9055431
              64      64  719850 1680521  7072991  8106691
             128       4  794524 1641547  3047907  5593968
             128       8  714943 1855765  3659171  7067311
             128      16  907149 1971302  3998455  8024457
             128      32  913639 1972550  4264961  8591876
             128      64  940353 1966813  5133705  8482310
             128     128  589827 1939563  7493941  9161294
             256       4  914393 1789041  3083072  5327684
             256       8 1003625 1985986  3418698  6727720
             256      16 1036056 2081176  3768237  7321265
             256      32  873480 2189455  2510449  6409127
             256      64 1085187 2169539  4059155  7751908
             256     128 1071159 2116832  4578331  4920670
             256     256  996437 2063853  4484973  4915610
             512       4  934373 1896459  2891328  3878340
             512       8 1089608 1874709  3262708  4529967
             512      16 1009842 2206935  3528347  4872549
             512      32 1177229 2295670  2754361  4378836
             512      64 1101168 2032522  3683930  5121576
             512     128 1096453 1977510  4027784  4338898
             512     256 1022149 2256646  3348968  2295303
             512     512  898267 1724340  1968857  1312827

Tests such as this get very interesting with performance disk systems.