Winter 2010 Presentations/Storage Performance

Title

Storage Performance By: David Chisholm (dmchisho@learn.senecac.on.ca)

Introduction

In order to have our Koji Build Farm run as efficiently as possible we needed to find out which form of data storage would be the fastest overall. The candidates were:

• PATA Hard Drive connected via USB
• NFS share from HongKong
• iSCSI network connection to HongKong

There are 3 main performance stats that we are concerned about when rating storage performance.

1. Read: The amount of data that can be read from the storage medium per second.
2. Write: The amount of data that can be written to the storage medium per second.
3. Access: Time required for a computer to process data from the processor and then retrieve the required data from a storage medium.

The fastest overall

Approach

Benchmark using a linux untiliy called Bonnie++ written by Russell Coker.

The Benchmark was run 3 times on each medium, the results were then averaged together.

The command used is as follows:

bonnie++ -d <location> -s 2048 -u root

Process

What happened while you worked on the problem? You had multiple iterations -- what happened at each milestone? Did you go down the wrong path and have to start over? What barriers did you encounter?

Discovery

What did you discover and learn during the process -- about the technology, the open source process, the community, yourself and your abilities, collaboration?

Results

Write

	Transfer Speed	Percentage Increase	CPU Usage	Percentage Increase
PATA	28,790 KB/s	0%	24%	0%
NFS	43,363 KB/s	50%	16%	-50%
iSCSI	31,503 KB/s	9%	30%	25%

Read

	Transfer Speed	Percentage Increase	CPU Usage	Percentage Increase
PATA	25,991 KB/s	0%	10%	0%
NFS	51,789 KB/s	99%	85%	850%
iSCSI	59,147 KB/s	127%	84%	840%

Links

• Access Time - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Access_time