Analysis of Performance of ZFS on our SunFire X4500's

For our 3 machines that will house user home directories, archive data, and certain LIGO data, we are going to use the 3 vdev config for the zpool, as this gets us the largest usable space, with an acceptable level of performance; this was decided by Patrick, Scott, and Paul.

The table below summarizes the performance testing we did with these systems. We performed a mix of local and remote tests over nfs. The speeds are in MB/s, and are listed as write/read, example 413w/427r means 413MB/s write / 427MB/s read. The complete results are linked to at the bottom of this page.

• The local bonnie tests were run using with "bonnie++ -s 32568:64k -x 3 -d /export/parmor/local -u root" (which runs 3 tests, using 32GB files, and 64KB chunk-size)

• The local dd testing results show the average of 3 passes of dd-ing from /dev/zero to a 100GB file using a 1MB block size, and reading from that same file to /dev/null.

• The "56 Clients" results show the sum of 56 clients (or 57, in some cases) performing bonnie testing using "bonnie++ -s 4096:64K -x 1 -d /x4500-$i/$name -u root" (one test, with a 4GB file and 64KB chunk-size).

• The "1 Client bonnie++" results use the same command line as used in the 56 client test.

• The "1 Client dd" results show the speeds dd-ing to and from a 10GB file, using a 1MB block size.