zfs discuss - Jul 2007 - Benchmarking nfs on zfs vs. other products?

List,

Sorry if this has been done before - I''m sure I''m not the only
person
interested in this, but I haven''t found anything with the searches
I''ve done.

I''m looking to compare nfs performance between nfs on zfs and a
lower-end netapp filer. It seems like the only way to do this is to
measure this from the client side, but tools like iozone and filebench
seem to be oriented to measuring performance from a single client,
while I think that that doesn''t work as a way to measure how many
operations can be done across multiple clients, eg. from a cluster.

Using filebench as an example, what I''m looking for is if there any
tools that extend filebench to work across multiple clients so that
the filesystem operations per unit time can be accounted for across
all of the clients instead of per-client summaries? 

Does any such project exist?

Thanks,

-Peter

-- 
The 5 year plan:
In five years we''ll make up another plan.
Or just re-use this one.

On Jul 8, 2007, at 8:05 PM, Peter C. Norton wrote:
> List,
>
> Sorry if this has been done before - I''m sure I''m not the
only person
> interested in this, but I haven''t found anything with the searches
> I''ve done.
>
> I''m looking to compare nfs performance between nfs on zfs and a
> lower-end netapp filer. It seems like the only way to do this is to
> measure this from the client side, but tools like iozone and filebench
> seem to be oriented to measuring performance from a single client,
> while I think that that doesn''t work as a way to measure how many
> operations can be done across multiple clients, eg. from a cluster.
>
> Using filebench as an example, what I''m looking for is if there
any
> tools that extend filebench to work across multiple clients so that
> the filesystem operations per unit time can be accounted for across
> all of the clients instead of per-client summaries?
>
> Does any such project exist?
Not currently, but multi-client support is definitely something we''re  
going to add for filebench.

We started looking at faban, gridengine, SLAMD, and autopilot.

GridEngine seems to be the early favorite.

As you''ve mentioned, you can do this manually by just running  
separate instances (1 per client), then doing the summary yourself.   
Not elegant by any means, but a possibility.

eric