Tag: Benchmark

My Notes and Benchmarks on VMware Flash Read Cache

I’ve spent some time exploring and studying the use and configuration of VMware Flash Read Cache (vFRC) and its benefits.  These are my notes.
Useful Resources

On a guest virtual machine, vFRC is configured in Disk configuration area.  The virtual machine needs to be on version 10 hardware.  vSphere needs to be minimum version 5.5.
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Benchmarks

I took a baseline benchmark of a simple Windows Server 2016 virtual machine that had a thin provisioned 20GB disk using DskSpd (formerly sqlio).  The virtual machine disk disk is connected to an IBM DS3400 LUN with 4 x 300GB 15k RPM disks in RAID-10.
Baseline Virtual Machine

  • OS: Windows Server 2016
  • vCPU: 1
  • vRAM: 4GB
  • SCSI Controller: LSI Logic SAS
  • Virtual Disk:  40GB thin provisioned
  • Virtual machine hardware:  vmx-10
  • Virtual Flash Read Cache: 0

Some notes before running a test.  This is geared toward SQL workloads and identifies the type of I/O for the different SQL workload.
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DskSpd test

diskspd.exe -c30G -d300 -r -w0 -t8 -o8 -b8K -h -L E:	estfile.dat

Results of testing.

Command Line: diskspd.exe -c30G -d300 -r -w0 -t8 -o8 -b8K -h -L E:	estfile.dat
Input parameters:
        timespan:   1
        -------------
        duration: 300s
        warm up time: 5s
        cool down time: 0s
        measuring latency
        random seed: 0
        path: 'E:	estfile.dat'
                think time: 0ms
                burst size: 0
                software cache disabled
                hardware write cache disabled, writethrough on
                performing read test
                block size: 8192
                using random I/O (alignment: 8192)
                number of outstanding I/O operations: 8
                thread stride size: 0
                threads per file: 8
                using I/O Completion Ports
                IO priority: normal
Results for timespan 1:
*******************************************************************************
actual test time:       301.18s
thread count:           8
proc count:             1
CPU |  Usage |  User  |  Kernel |  Idle
-------------------------------------------
   0|  99.23%|   7.05%|   92.18%|   0.77%
-------------------------------------------
avg.|  99.23%|   7.05%|   92.18%|   0.77%
Total IO
thread |       bytes     |     I/Os     |     MB/s   |  I/O per s |  AvgLat  | LatStdDev |  file
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     0 |      7940784128 |       969334 |      25.14 |    3218.43 |    2.471 |    22.884 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     1 |      8152604672 |       995191 |      25.81 |    3304.28 |    2.401 |    22.211 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     2 |      8116256768 |       990754 |      25.70 |    3289.55 |    2.408 |    22.080 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     3 |      8180006912 |       998536 |      25.90 |    3315.38 |    2.394 |    22.936 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     4 |      8192147456 |      1000018 |      25.94 |    3320.30 |    2.395 |    22.569 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     5 |      8283185152 |      1011131 |      26.23 |    3357.20 |    2.375 |    21.607 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     6 |      7820320768 |       954629 |      24.76 |    3169.60 |    2.508 |    21.745 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     7 |      7896784896 |       963963 |      25.00 |    3200.59 |    2.479 |    21.981 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
total:       64582090752 |      7883556 |     204.49 |   26175.34 |    2.428 |    22.258
Read IO
thread |       bytes     |     I/Os     |     MB/s   |  I/O per s |  AvgLat  | LatStdDev |  file
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     0 |      7940784128 |       969334 |      25.14 |    3218.43 |    2.471 |    22.884 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     1 |      8152604672 |       995191 |      25.81 |    3304.28 |    2.401 |    22.211 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     2 |      8116256768 |       990754 |      25.70 |    3289.55 |    2.408 |    22.080 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     3 |      8180006912 |       998536 |      25.90 |    3315.38 |    2.394 |    22.936 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     4 |      8192147456 |      1000018 |      25.94 |    3320.30 |    2.395 |    22.569 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     5 |      8283185152 |      1011131 |      26.23 |    3357.20 |    2.375 |    21.607 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     6 |      7820320768 |       954629 |      24.76 |    3169.60 |    2.508 |    21.745 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     7 |      7896784896 |       963963 |      25.00 |    3200.59 |    2.479 |    21.981 | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
total:       64582090752 |      7883556 |     204.49 |   26175.34 |    2.428 |    22.258
Write IO
thread |       bytes     |     I/Os     |     MB/s   |  I/O per s |  AvgLat  | LatStdDev |  file
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     0 |               0 |            0 |       0.00 |       0.00 |    0.000 |       N/A | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     1 |               0 |            0 |       0.00 |       0.00 |    0.000 |       N/A | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     2 |               0 |            0 |       0.00 |       0.00 |    0.000 |       N/A | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     3 |               0 |            0 |       0.00 |       0.00 |    0.000 |       N/A | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     4 |               0 |            0 |       0.00 |       0.00 |    0.000 |       N/A | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     5 |               0 |            0 |       0.00 |       0.00 |    0.000 |       N/A | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     6 |               0 |            0 |       0.00 |       0.00 |    0.000 |       N/A | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
     7 |               0 |            0 |       0.00 |       0.00 |    0.000 |       N/A | E:	estfile.dat (30GB)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
total:                 0 |            0 |       0.00 |       0.00 |    0.000 |       N/A
  %-ile |  Read (ms) | Write (ms) | Total (ms)
----------------------------------------------
    min |      0.068 |        N/A |      0.068
   25th |      0.261 |        N/A |      0.261
   50th |      0.274 |        N/A |      0.274
   75th |      0.305 |        N/A |      0.305
   90th |      0.413 |        N/A |      0.413
   95th |      3.097 |        N/A |      3.097
   99th |     57.644 |        N/A |     57.644
3-nines |    198.563 |        N/A |    198.563
4-nines |    995.725 |        N/A |    995.725
5-nines |   1896.496 |        N/A |   1896.496
6-nines |   1954.282 |        N/A |   1954.282
7-nines |   1954.318 |        N/A |   1954.318
8-nines |   1954.318 |        N/A |   1954.318
9-nines |   1954.318 |        N/A |   1954.318
    max |   1954.318 |        N/A |   1954.318

The important part of this shows that at 204MB/s throughput and 26k IOPs, I had average 2ms latency.

thread |       bytes     |     I/Os     |     MB/s   |  I/O per s |  AvgLat  | LatStdDev
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
total:       64582090752 |      7883556 |     204.49 |   26175.34 |    2.428 |    22.258

Here is a view from my monitoring software, essentially validating the latency.
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A good starting point for SQL workload testing would be something like:

diskspd –b8K –d30 –o4 –t8 –h –r –w25 –L –Z1G –c20G D:iotest.dat > DiskSpeedResults.txt

At this point, I just need to get the SSD installed on the host and test VMware Flash Read Cache.
To be continued…

Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Opera Benchmarks

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I’m not a browser war kinda dude but I had some free time and decided to run some benchmarks after installing IE10 today on my Windows 7 workstation.  Here are the results of what I found.

Browsers Tested

  • Internet Explorer 10
  • Chrome 23.0.1271.95 m
  • Firefox 17.0
  • Opera 12.11

Benchmarks/Tests Performed

  • V8 Benchmark Suite (7)
  • Futuremark
  • ACID3
  • RoboHornet Alpha1
  • Octane v1

Environment

Windows 7 Professional x64 (Lenovo ThinkCentre m90p [Intel i5, 4GB RAM]).  Tested 1 browser at a time;  all applications closed.  Fresh installs of each browser with default settings in tact.

Results V8 Benchmark Suite (ordered by best to worst)

Chrome

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Chrome

 

Firefox

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Firefox

 

Internet Explorer

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Internet Explorer 10

Opera

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Opera

Futuremark Benchmark (results ordered best to worst)

Opera

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Opera

Internet Explorer

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Internet Explorer

Chrome

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Chrome

Firefox

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Firefox

 ACID3 (results all 100/100)

Internet Explorer

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Internet Explorer

Chrome

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Chrome

Firefox

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Firefox

Opera

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Opera

RoboHornet Alpha1

Internet Explorer

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Internet Explorer

Chrome

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Chrome

Firefox

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Firefox

Opera (Kept crashing, sorry)

Octane v1 (results ordered best to worst)

Chrome

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Chrome

Firefox

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Firefox

Opera

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Opera

Internet Explorer

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Internet Explorer

 
 

IOPS Calculator

Here are some of the links I have for IOPS calculators on my site:

Some useful information on some of the graphing I had done with SQLIO measurements

Testing Disk IO in Linux

Testing Disk in Linux using fio

I recently discovered a utility called fio that allows you to benchmark disk subsystem in Linux. Here are the results for this test.
What is fio?

fio is an I/O tool meant to be used both for benchmark and stress/hardware verification. It has support for 13 different types of I/O engines (sync, mmap, libaio, posixaio, SG v3, splice, null, network, syslet, guasi, solarisaio, and more), I/O priorities (for newer Linux kernels), rate I/O, forked or threaded jobs, and much more. It can work on block devices as well as files. fio accepts job descriptions in a simple-to-understand text format. Several example job files are included. fio displays all sorts of I/O performance information. Fio is in wide use in many places, for both benchmarking, QA, and verification purposes. It supports Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OS X, OpenSolaris, AIX, HP-UX, and Windows.

Windows fio download:  http://www.bluestop.org/fio/
OS – Debian Linux “Wheezy” AMD64
RAM – 8GB
Virtualized – YES
VMware Tools – YES
Disk – 1 x 50GB Thin Provisioned
Test File – 10GB
Note:  Disk is on a LUN that is comprised of RAID5 using 6 disks @ 15kRPM – no throttling for disk/cpu is configured on VM.

 
Here are my fio test files:

[randrw]
rw=randread
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=randr-4k
bs=4k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=randread
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=randr-8k
bs=8k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=randrw
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=randrw-4k
bs=4k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=randrw
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=randrw-8k
bs=8k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=randwrite
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=randw-4k
bs=4k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=randrw
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=random-rw-direct
bs=8k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=read
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=seqr-4k
bs=4k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=read
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=seqr-8k
bs=8k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=rw
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=seqrw-4k
bs=4k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=rw
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=seqrw-8k
bs=8k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=write
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=seqw-4k
bs=4k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log
[randrw]
rw=write
size=10G
direct=1
directory=/tmp/
numjobs=1
group_reporting
name=seqw-8k
bs=8k
runtime=30
write_iops_log
write_lat_log
write_bw_log

I used fio_generate_plot to generate gnuplot graphs.

Visualizing SQLIO: Disk benchmark results using a PivotChart

This is a quick video of what I was working on for a little today. I created a batch script that will benchmark a disk(s) using SQLIO and record the output to a single file (or multiple, if necessary). After benchmarking completes, I run SQLIOResults and choose the output file that was created by my batch script.

Once SQLIOResults parses the SQLIO output and finishes inserting it into Excel, I create a PivotChart to compare the disk(s) IOPS and MB/s at each of the different test levels.

Hopefully someone else will find this useful. Also, if anyone knows how I can create a pivot chart in Powershell (if there’s a COM call), please let me know so I can completely automate this!