I've decided to redo my production server to take advantage of 4K blocks and RAIDz3. Since I'm taking it offline and allowing failover to the backup server, this seems like a good time to try a series of performance tests that others might find helpful as they are building and configuring their systems.
The questions I'm trying to answer are raw performance related:
512/4K sectors
mirror/striped mirror/parity
RAIDz1/z2/z3
Number of drives in an a Vdev (The n^2-parity question)
I really don't want to try to get into protocol related performance -- just how the ZFS file system performs on a fairly high-end system.
What test methodology would you suggest? I have seen several in the forum and I'd prefer to use one that makes the tests useful to others who are trying to compare. Some options I've found:
IOZONE as suggested in ZFS and 4K. I'm willing to do a couple of these, but since they take so long, I can realistically only it for the potential best and worst case scenarios.
A 100GB dd transfer as suggested here: Slow performance, 36MB/s, E350 w/ 8GB RAM
A variation on dd that adds an extra 'sync' in an effort to improve accuracy: Weird raidz1 and raidz2 performance with 4 drives - any explanation?
These dd tests are quite fast for me to execute, so I'm inclined to use them. However, if you have any suggestions that would improve the usefulness of these tests, please feel free to share.
The questions I'm trying to answer are raw performance related:
512/4K sectors
mirror/striped mirror/parity
RAIDz1/z2/z3
Number of drives in an a Vdev (The n^2-parity question)
I really don't want to try to get into protocol related performance -- just how the ZFS file system performs on a fairly high-end system.
What test methodology would you suggest? I have seen several in the forum and I'd prefer to use one that makes the tests useful to others who are trying to compare. Some options I've found:
IOZONE as suggested in ZFS and 4K. I'm willing to do a couple of these, but since they take so long, I can realistically only it for the potential best and worst case scenarios.
A 100GB dd transfer as suggested here: Slow performance, 36MB/s, E350 w/ 8GB RAM
A variation on dd that adds an extra 'sync' in an effort to improve accuracy: Weird raidz1 and raidz2 performance with 4 drives - any explanation?
These dd tests are quite fast for me to execute, so I'm inclined to use them. However, if you have any suggestions that would improve the usefulness of these tests, please feel free to share.