Winter 2010 Presentations/Storage Performance
Title
Storage Performance By: David Chisholm (dmchisho@learn.senecac.on.ca)
Introduction
In order to have our Koji Build Farm run as efficiently as possible we needed to find out which form of data storage would be the fastest overall. The candidates were:
- PATA Hard Drive connected via USB
- NFS share from HongKong
- iSCSI network connection to HongKong
There are 3 main performance stats that are of concern when rating storage performance.
1. Read: The amount of data that can be read from the storage medium per second.
2. Write: The amount of data that can be written to the storage medium per second.
3. Access: Time required for a computer to process data from the processor and then retrieve the required data from a storage medium.
Approach
Benchmark using a linux untiliy called Bonnie++ written by Russell Coker.
The Benchmark was run 3 times on each medium, the results were then averaged together.
The command used is as follows:
bonnie++ -d <location> -s 2048 -u root
Process
What happened while you worked on the problem? You had multiple iterations -- what happened at each milestone? Did you go down the wrong path and have to start over? What barriers did you encounter?
Discovery
What did you discover and learn during the process -- about the technology, the open source process, the community, yourself and your abilities, collaboration?
Results
Write
| Transfer Speed | Percentage Increase | CPU Usage | Percentage Increase | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PATA | 28,790 KB/s | 0% | 24% | 0% |
| NFS | 43,363 KB/s | 50% | 16% | -50% |
| iSCSI | 31,503 KB/s | 9% | 30% | 25% |
Read
| Transfer Speed | Percentage Increase | CPU Usage | Percentage Increase | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PATA | 25,991 KB/s | 0% | 10% | 0% |
| NFS | 51,789 KB/s | 99% | 85% | 850% |
| iSCSI | 59,147 KB/s | 127% | 84% | 840% |