Hardware Benchmarks

Benchmarks help us in testing and quantification of our hardware infrastructure. Consistently performant hardware infrastructure forms the base of a high performance data structure. A cloud deployment or an on-prem high density virtualisation platform shares its compute and storage across multiple hosts. This typically causes hot and cold patches in performance.

This document discusses standard hardware testing and benchmarking tools that can be used to benchmark hardware before a deployment.

Testing Process

When to test, how to ensure consistent performance.

1. Test and benchmark your hardware before you install, to ensure the underlying hardware fulfils expecations. Initial results must satisfy or exceed the performance benchmarks indicated in scaling datanodes or your custom solution design document.
2. Repeat tests if you find performance related issues while in operations and compare the results with the initial benchmarking.

Benchmarking

This section will cover in detail the tools and the commands used to benchmark hardware.

Testing tool

Choosing the right tool that will remain consistent across tests is extremely important, for DNIF we have selected sysbench which has been available and trusted for years. Sysbench is also a part of the standard linux stack so it can be installed using the following command.

sudo apt install sysbench

CPU Benchmarking

CPU Benchmarking using a single thread

sysbench --test=cpu --num-threads=1 --cpu-max-prime=20000 run

CPU Benchmarking using multiple (we will use 8) threads

sysbench --test=cpu --num-threads=8 --cpu-max-prime=20000 run

The test metric to be measured are

• Total run time in seconds
• Total number of events executed
• CPU events executed

Memory Benchmarking

Benchmarking memory using a single thread

sysbench --test=memory --num-threads=1 run

Benchmarking memory using multiple (we will use 8) threads

sysbench --test=memory --num-threads=8 run

The test metric to be measured are

• Operations per second
• Throughput

File IO Benchmarking

Benchmarking file IO is done in three parts – create a test file for a specific size, conduct your test on the file and finally delete the file to return the used disk space back to operations.
Preparing for benchmarking

sysbench --test=fileio --file-total-size=150G prepare

Conducting the test

sysbench --test=fileio --file-total-size=150G --file-test-mode=rndrw --max-requests=0 run

Cleaning up after the test

sysbench --test=fileio --file-total-size=150G cleanup

The test metric to be measured are

• Write speed during test prepare
• Read and write operations per second
• Read and write throughput

Benchmark samples

We have collected some samples to indicate what the results of these tests look like on available cloud infrastructures.

The samples have been generated from the following test setups

• DigitalOcean (DO) REF 16vCPU
• DigitalOcean (DO) REF 32vCPU

Test	Metric	DO REF 16vCPU	DO REF 32vCPU	AWS Netmon	Azure Netmon(SSD)	Azure Netmon (Standard SSD)	DO 4 shared vCPU	DO 8 shared vCPU	Azure Cloud Internal16(B-series)	Azure Cloud Internal 32(F-seriesv2)
CPU Single Thread	Total time (s)	10.0014 ✅	10.0016 ✅	10.0002	10.0004	10.0009s	10.0024	10.0011	10.0012s	10.0011s
	Total events	4658 ✅	4607 ✅	4612	3236	3316	2580	2500	3062	4347
	CPU Events / sec	465.65 ✅	460.56 ✅	461.13	323.53	331.49	257.87	249.91	306.08	434.59
CPU Multi Thread	Total time (s)	10.0012 ✅	10.0019 ✅	10.0029	10.0032	10.0022	10.0061	10.004	10.0029s	10.0021s
	Total events	35158 ✅	36426 ✅	25634	24593	25209	10498	18848	24518	34156
	CPU Events / sec	3514.82 ✅	3641.14 ✅	2562.18	2457.93	2519.77	1048.93	1883.61	2450.51	3414.22
Memory Single Thread	Throughput (MB/s)	4969.27 ✅	5298.52 ✅	5772.9	9608.49	4082.95	2816.15	2889.8	4013.92	5196.55
	Operations / sec	5088537.19 ✅	5425685.2 ✅	59122793	9839093.85	4180224.62	28845219	2959155.46	4110249.09	5321272.09
Memory Multi Thread	Throughput (MB/s)	7217.27 ✅	7791.13 ✅	7435.38	8192.92	8338.35	5893.93	8673.99	8422.64	7045.25
	Operations / sec	7390489.56 ✅	7978120.44 ✅	76149504	8389545.66	8538467.96	6035383.23	8882162.08	8624780.2	7214336.11
File IO Operations (Random Read Write)	Read / sec	2745.78 ✅	5252.33 ✅	1468.03	4065.71	324.99	449.06	760.13	365.45	310.50
	Write / sec	1830.52 ✅	3501.56 ✅	978.69	2710.47	216.59	299.37	506.76	243.63	207.00
	fsyncs / sec	5868.46 ✅	11205.08 ✅	3138.09	8684.41	702.03	970.57	1627.41	788.41	664.59
File IO Throughput (Random Read Write)	Read MB / sec	42.90 ✅	82.07✅	22.94	63.53	5.08 ❌	7.02❌	11.88 ❌	5.71❌	4.85 ❌
	Write MiB / sec	28.60✅	54.71✅	15.29	42.35	3.38 ❌	4.68 ❌	7.92 ❌	3.81 ❌	3.23 ❌
Disk Write Speed	Write MB/sec	836.41 ✅	847.68 ✅						46.67	233.23