tiotest - Threaded I/O bench

tiotest [-h] [-W] [-f SizeInMB] [-d TestDir] [-b BlkSizeInBytes] [-r NumberRandOpsPerThread] [-t NumberOfThreads] [-T] [-c] [-L] [-S] [-R] [-D DebugLevel] [-k SkipTestNoN]

tiotest is a file system benchmark especially designed to test I/O performance with multiple running threads.

-h

Display a brief help and exit.

-W

Instructs tiotest to wait for previous thread to finish before starting a new one in the writing phase. This results in the files to be sequentially allocated and thus prevents them to be fragmented. Of course the writeside test is not parallel then but in readside the files are physically more sequentially placed on the media (well this depends on the filesystem too).

-f SizeInMB

The filesize per threat in MBytes. Defaults to 10 MB.

-d TestDir

The directory in which to test. Defaults to ., the current directory.

-b BlkSizeInBytes

The blocksize in Bytes to use. Defaults to 4096.

-r NumberRandOpsPerThread

Random I/O operations per thread. Defaults to 1000.

-t NumberOfThreads

The number of concurrent test threads. Defaults to 4.

-T

More terse output.

-c

Consistency check data. This should be used for stresstesting the media rather than benchmarking (it will slow io and raise cpu percentage). It is especially usefull to seek media for very hard to detect errors.

-L

Hide latency output.

-S

Do writing synchronously.

-R

Use raw drives.

-D DebugLevel

Set the debug level.

-k fISkipTestNoN

Skip test number n. Could be used several times.

Example:

while tiotest -c -f 2000 ; do echo run ok ; done

To get usefull results the used file sizes should be a lot larger than the physical amount of memory you have. A good idea is to boot with 16 Megs of RAM (Try passing the "mem=16M" option to the kernel to limit Linux to using a very small amount of memory) and into Single User mode only.

tiobench(1), bonnie(1), hdparm(8)

tiotest was written by Mika Kuoppala <miku@iki.fi>.

This manual page was written by Peter Palfrader <weasel@debian.org>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).