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I'm given a project where the only objective is to monitor a network's NFS performance. I know there's a bunch of open source tools out there, but still I would like to get the basic idea behind in order to better tweak those around. So the network consists of some hundred linux systems and some thousand accounts with NFS mounted home dir's; the script can be pushed out to every station, server is also possible, if that way does any good. Afaik, essentially all the script should do is a few dd's and watch the IO rate over NFS.
And my question is just what is the proper way of doing so? Do I add a new account to the system solely to run the scripts?
Some general thoughts are greatly appreciated :)

fy_iceworld
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  • What is the system used for? The best benchmark is always "the application(s) that you normally use". The load on a NFS system when you have 20 people simultaneously compiling a Linux kernel is comletely different from a bunch of people logging in at the same time or the accounts uses as "home directories for the local web-server". – Mats Petersson Jan 16 '13 at 21:36
  • There is no "the proper way". Define your requirements and expectations, then test to see if they are met or not. The appropriate tools to use for testing depend significantly on what you are trying to test. – twalberg Jan 16 '13 at 21:43
  • Thanks guys! Mostly IO speed, right now the problem is, occasionally for some reason our NFS reads/writes become extremely slow and unresponsive, so all I need is to have the script watch for that and trigger something else.. That's why I feel like benchmarking tools are probably over kill..? – fy_iceworld Jan 16 '13 at 21:56

1 Answers1

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Bonnie

A classical performances evaluation tool tests. The main program tests database type access to a single file (or a set of files if you wish to test more than 1G of storage), and it tests creation, reading, and deleting of small files which can simulate the usage of programs such as Squid, INN, or Maildir format email.

Relevance to NFS:: Performance testing, workload

DBench

Dbench was written to allow independent developers to debug and test SAMBA. It is heavily inspired of the original SAMBA tool : NetBench

As NetBench it allow to:

torture the file system improve the network load independently of the disk IO Measure performances

But it does not need as much hardware resources as NetBench to run.

Relevance to NFS::

IOZone

Performance tests suite. POSIX and 64 bits compliant. This tests is the file system test from the L.S.E. Main features

POSIX async I/O, Mmap() file I/O, Normal file I/O Single stream measurement, Multiple stream measurement, Distributed file server measurements (Cluster) POSIX pthreads, Multi-process measurement Selectable measurements with fsync, O_SYNC Latency plots

Relevance to NFS:: Performance testing. Good for exercising a given mount point under various load conditions.

ful detail can be found here . http://wiki.linux-nfs.org/wiki/index.php/Testing_tools

Garry
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