what is the proper way to test NFS performance

linux performance monitoring nfs system-administration
zee picture zee · Jan 16, 2013 · Viewed 31.5k times · Source

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 :)

Answer

Garry picture Garry · Jan 16, 2013 
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

Related questions

Perfmon-like for Linux?

In windows there is perfmon to monitor various performances aspects (called counters) of the system. Is there a perfmon-like for Linux? especially, in interested in... CPU usage (total/per process/in kernel) Memory usage (total/per process/in kernel) ...Is …

Read More
Command-line Tool to find Java Heap Size and Memory Used (Linux)?

Is there a Command-line Tool (Linux) to check Heap Size (and Used Memory) of a Java Application? I have tried through jmap. But it gives info. about internal memory areas like Eden/ PermGen etc., which is not useful to me. …

Read More
How do I measure separate CPU core usage for a process?

Is there any way to measure a specific process CPU usage by cores? I know top is good for measuring the whole system's CPU usage by cores and taskset can provide information about which CPU core is allowed for the …

Read More