iotools
iotools consists of three tools I've written over the years to benchmark tape drive performance, tape capacity, and random disk I/O performance, specifically used when tuning TSM. Mainly written under NetBSD and Darwin, tested under AIX, Linux, Solaris and Tru64.
From the README:
fblckgen
fblckgen generates blocks of data, either a repeating ascii sequence which is very compressible, or a pseudo-random binary sequence, which, although very simple, does not compress. Very handy for benchmarking tape drives, or just making a sized lump of data. By using double buffering and either pthreads or multiple processes, it can generally keep a tape drive busy.
Filling an LTO1 tape with pseudo-random data:
sh$ fblckgen -rb 64k -c 0 > /dev/nrst1 Write failed: Input/output error 105722740736 bytes written in 7064.506 secs (14614.590 KB/sec)
iohammer
iohammer does what it says - very similar to a tool named `rawio' floating out on the 'net. Using multiple threads (either pthreads or multiple processes) iohammer will issue random I/Os, with a percentage based write ratio to a file or raw device. Good for comparing different disk layouts (RAID5, RAID0, RAID1, RAID0+1, RAID3, etc), stripe unit sizes, and general disk random I/O performance. Very good to see the difference the queue_depth parameter makes under AIX!
Testing random read performance on a raw partition:
sh$ iohammer -f /dev/vnd0d -c 10k Size 1073741824: 121.097 secs, 10240 IOs, 0 writes 84.6 IOs/sec, 11.83 ms average seek
mbdd
mbdd is a threaded version of dd, without all the extras. It maintains a number of buffers, a thread to read from standard input to fill the buffers, a thread to (optionally) write to standard output, and threads for any additional destinations, emptying the buffers. Several reads may be done to fill a buffer entirely. A partial write (not a full buffer length) will abort the copy.
Its primary use is as a buffer between bursty, non-threaded programs. One example is its use between tar(1) and bzip2(1), allowing both utilities to attempt to run without waiting on the other.
As a buffer between tar(1) and bzip2(1), using a total of 20 MiB buffer space:
sh$ time tar -cf - . | mbdd -n 320 | bzip2 > /tmp/arc.tar.bz2 807311360 bytes transferred in 374.285 secs (2106.392 KiB/sec) 88694 partial reads, 218.527 average buffers full 374.37s real 311.43s user 18.64s system
Compared to without:
sh$ time tar -cf - . | bzip2 > /tmp/arc.tar.bz2 556.37s real 307.44s user 11.60s system
Download
iotools-2.2.tgz 79 011 bytes gzipped source tarball via FTP
See Also
HTML man pages for fblckgen(1), iohammer(1) and mbdd(1).