IO Performance Tests

This repository holds a script to test the IO performance of a filesystem using dd.

It is aimed at running on a Linux system and has primarily been tested on CentOS 7 and Rocky 8.

Run the tests

The only required argument is the path to the temporary file used for the read/write tests, e.g.

./seq-io.sh $HOME/tempfile

will perform the tests on a file called tempfile in the $HOME directory. The temporary file is removed after the tests complete.

Plotting the results

Prerequisites

Install Conda for the current user as described in the Conda documentation.

Once installed open a shell and change to the directory of this cloned repository and run:

conda env create -f ./condaenv -p ./condaenv
conda activate ./condaenv

After the first run of conda env create ... you only need to run the conda activate ./condaenv command when opening a new shell.

Plot

A single run of the script runs 5 loops of both write and read tests using dd and prints the results to stdout. To persist the results to a file redirect the output, e.g

./seq-io.sh $HOME/tempfile > results_dir/$(date +%y%d%m_%H%M%S).json

where results_dir is any directory that will hold the results (it must exist). The date command names the file with a timestamp describing when the script began executing and

To plot all of the results in results_dir run:

python ./plot-seq-io.py results_dir

Inspecting disk hardware

To print a list of block devices with additional information run: