[Bioclusters] Tool to benchmark disk IO?

Guy Coates bioclusters@bioinformatics.org
Sat, 25 Sep 2004 11:38:09 +0100 (BST)


One thing which makes a big difference in IO speed is tweaking the various
mount options:

For your NFS mounts, the following is a good start (maybe proto=tcp if
your server supports it):

rsize=8192,wsize=8192,hard,intr,vers=3,proto=udp


For ext3, mount  with "data=writeback"[1], and for reiserfs mount  with
"notail" options.  If you've got it compiled into your kernel, XFS is
worth trying too. It is quite speedy.

Guy


[1] Check the man page for what this does; if you machine goes down in the
middle of a file write you stand an increase chance of that file getting
mangled; the filesystem itself should be OK.

 --
Dr. Guy Coates,  Informatics System Group
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Cambridge, CB10 1SA, UK
Tel: +44 (0)1223 834244 ex 7199