[clug] Testing filesystem performance?

[Darren Freeman]

On Sun, 2004-06-27 at 11:37, Michael Still wrote:
> Heya,
> 
> one of the things I need to do to finish my FUSE talk is come up with 
> some timings for how slow FUSE actually is. So far I've done three 
> kernel compiles on an ext3 filesystem, and then three kernel compiles on 
> a FUSE filesystem which rewrites all accesses straight back to that same 
> ext3 filesystem.
> 
> That's not a perfect metric, as we're also measuring how slow the hard 
> disc and CPU in my laptop are...

Use a ram disc such as tempfs to hold all the files, and then profule
the userspace application that thrashes the filesystem - see if you can
see filesystem CPU usage in the stats. Certainly if you had it going
flat out, the %system indicator in the "top" listing would help.

> Do people have other suggestions as to how to test the performance of a 
> filesystem? Google seems to suggest just creating a bunch of files and 
> directories, syncing a few times, and then deleting some stuff.

Or you could try getting the people at Google to test it for you. I'm
sure those guys would notice a 0.0001% slowdown in their filesystem ;)

> Thanks,
> Mikal

Have fun,
Darren