[Lustre-discuss] Benchmarking small file performance

[Balagopal Pillai]

On Sat, 17 May 2008, Ragnar Kjørstad wrote:
Hi,

     Postmark is a good benchmark for small file peformance. I have tried 
it with gfs and lustre before for comparison. Lustre doesn't shine well in 
that benchmark. But when the file size is set a little high, lustre does pick 
up quite a bit.

Regards
Balagopal


> Hi Rick,
> 
> 
> On Thu, May 15, 2008 at 04:21:56PM -0400, Rick Friedman wrote:
> > We build a Lustre appliance that comes fully configured and tuned. A
> > number of customers have asked us about small file performance. We are
> > looking for feedback on how people "quantify" this type of performance
> > with their Lustre based systems. In most cases we are looking at
> > applications that are reading and writing files in the 1K to 20M size
> > range. 
> 
> One tool commonly used to compare file system operation performance for
> local filesystems and NFS clients is bonnie++
> (http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/). It's not really designed for
> paralell filesystems but at least it will quantify single-client lustre
> performance in a way that your customers can relate to. 
> 
> Note that since bonnie++ only runs on a single machine at the time you
> need some kind of wrapper to run it on a multi-client lustre cluster.
> There is a very primitive one available at
> http://ragnark.vestdata.no/download/dbonnie++.txt, but what you should
> do is make a version of bonnie++ that use MPI for syncronization instead
> of semaphores, so that it can easily be run on clusters.
> 
> 
> 
>