[Bioclusters] Tool to benchmark disk IO?

Dan Bolser bioclusters@bioinformatics.org
Fri, 24 Sep 2004 18:56:31 +0100 (BST)


Hi, I have checked the archive, but I can't find any reference to a simple
IO 'tester' app to benchmark disk IO.

I am fairly sure it would be easy to write a little tool to do this. Has
anyone done that?

I would like to be able to say things like

ioRateTool --test-file /IDEDiskMount/testFile.scratch
ioRateTool --test-file /SCSIDiskMount/testFile.scratch
ioRateTool --test-file /NFSDiskMount/testFile.scratch
ioRateTool --test-file /ramfsDiskMount/testFile.scratch
ioRateTool --test-file /dev/null/testFile.scratch

Although I guess that last one could only measure 'disk' write speed and
not read speed.

I want to see if my current NFS settings can be optimized, and I would
like a clean (and hopefully robust) way to check what effect changing the
options have.

Thanks for any pointers,
Dan.

Ahhh... I just found the collective NFS rant... 

We use NFS as our principal 'communication' channel, that is to say it is
our group sand box. We put all our downloaded databases / scripts / data /
homes on one big nfs server. This allows us to work on the same data
easily, share files / results etc.

Most of our 'day to day' computing is over this data. 

How many Hail Mary's should I say?