[Bioclusters] Tool to benchmark disk IO?

[elijah wright]

'bonnie'.

not sure that it will work over nfs.  probably not.  but you probably need 
to tweak local disk performance before you worry about NFS anyway.

elijah

> 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?