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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.

Example #2

check_throughput.ksh

Example #3