Determining Disk Throughput - (Sun)

by Jeff Hunter, Sr. Database Administrator

Overview

This document provides several example on how to test and determine

disk throughput.

Write Example #1

Here is an easy solution to determine the time (and throughput) on how

long it would take to write 1GB of data to a file. Keep in mind that you
will also want to perform (and time) a sync after the write has completed:

# rm -f /u07/app/test/gigfile

# sync; time dd ibs=1048576 obs=1048576 count=1024

if=/dev/zero of=/u07/app/test/gigfile
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out

real 0m36.41s
user 0m13.36s
sys 0m17.73s

# time sync
real 0m0.15s
user 0m0.00s
sys 0m0.04s

From the above, we can estimate that I am getting roughly 28.01 MB/sec.

1024 MB / (36.41 + 0.15) (s) = 28.01 MB/sec.