Benchmarking for Unix Noob and other General Questions

[Destinova]

Hello, I have completed my initial build and am in the process of reading through all of the great documentation here. I have a couple of quick questions that I haven't quite been able to find the answer to yet, so I thought I might get a quick answer here.

First off, here's the build:

Build FreeNAS-8.3.1-RELEASE-p2-x64 (r12686+b770da6_dirty)
Platform Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Quad CPU Q9300 @ 2.50GHz
Memory 8109MB
Motherboard - Intel DP35DP
Hard Drives: 6 x 2TB Seagate 7200RPM in RAIDZ2

It's not going to be running any SQL/Oracle/etc/ databases, just file storage and media streaming so I don't believe I need to start worrying about a ZIL from what I have read.

1. What is the simplest way to get a quick benchmark of the FreeNAS performance? I've tried a couple of large file transfers to a share and have seen decent results - sustained 800Mbps on the network and 90-100MB/s transfer according to Windows. I haven't done any tuning on my switch yet so there might be some performance to be gained there, but I'd really like to understand if there's anything I need to tweak in FreeNAS.

1.5. Once I have some benchmark information where can I compare it? What sort of performance should I be expecting from this build?

2. Is the use of autotune recommended?

Thanks in advance!

 

[survive]

Hi Destinova,

First thing....odds are you don't need a ZIL. Don't worry about adding one till you have verified that you need one\that it would help with how you use your filer.

There really isn't a standard benchmark that "we" use simply because there is a huge variation in system size among the users here. A benchmark that would crush my system would run entirely in cache on some of the bigger systems! That said there is always the popular "dd" run that will give you a crude measure of disk throughput and both "iozone" and "xdd are included in FreeNAS by default.

That said, if you are showing ~100MB/s in windows explorer and you plan on mainly using CIFS\windows sharing I would say you are running pretty damn good. There are guys around here who would kill for that sort of performance and have spent a lot of time tweaking and testing to try to get there. If I were you I wouldn't worry to much about trying to eek a few more MB/s out of the system & if you do be sure to take notes so you can unwind your changes if they don't help\make it worse.

I think autotune is actually meant more to set some system parameters that add stability in a lower-memory system that increasing performance on a more powerful system. There's certainly no harm in enabling it and seeing what your results are....if it doesn't improve results you can remove the settings it adds from System -> "Sysctls" & "Tunables".

-Will

 

[Destinova]

Much appreciated Will. I'll just step away from the console then. :)