In a previous article, I wrote about using bonnie++ (http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++/) to benchmark the performance of your hard drives and filesystem. We went through a sample command, explained all the parameters (most notably, -s).
In this post I’d like to display and summarize the results from running bonnie++ on two systems: a Linode (as the title suggests) and a physical server as the control.
Linode is a VPS hosting company with availability in the US and Europe. They strive for the best service possible, and are a very well regarded provider within the hosting community. The linode I chose for the purposes of this test is their “Linode 360″ which comes with 360MB RAM, 16GB of storage, 200GB of transit, and a price tag of $19.95 per month. This is their entry-level setup, and their instances can scale up to 2.8GB RAM, 128GB storage, 1.6TB transit (for $159.95/month).
The command we’re running to invoke bonnie++ is:
# bonnie++ -u 0 -r 360 -s 7200 -n 256 -b -d /
Note the new values for -r and -s from my last post.
Results (click for a larger version): 
On the far left of the results, in bold, you will see the machine’s hostname. In my case, this is the Linode assigned hostname of li149-50. The next column is labeled “Size: Chunk Size,” which is basically the size we specified as the size to use for IO performance measurements (the -s flag).
As stated in my last post, bonnie++ offers three specific metrics:
- Data read and write speed.
- Maximum seeks per second.
- Maximum file metadata operations per second.
Applying these three metrics to our results, the following correlations can be established:
- Sequential Input and Sequential Output apply to 1
- Random Seeks apply to 2
- Sequential Create and Random Create apply to 3
Now, let’s summarize with real numbers.
Server li149-50 was able to:
- sustain ~85MBS at 13% CPU for sequential block writes.
- sustain ~180MBS at 0% CPU for sequential block reads.
- max out at 167.9 random seeks per second.
- sequentially create 2,236 files per second.
- randomly create 2,001 files per second.
- sequentially read metadata from 395,067 files per second at 99% CPU.
- randomly read metadata from 503,021 files per second at 99% CPU.
- sequentially delete 1,014 files per second.
- randomly delete 610 files per second.
Running the same bonnie++ command (with different -r and -s flags) on a physical server with an 80GB PATA drive yields the following (for reference, the values were “1024″ and “20480″ for “-r” and “-s”, respectively):
# bonnie++ -u 0 -r 1024 -s 20480 -n 256 -b -d /
Results (click for a larger version): 
Summarizing in a similar fashion from above, we get the following:
Server tp.eliminated.org was able to
- sustain ~41MBS at 29% CPU for sequential block writes.
- sustain ~50MBS at 10% CPU for sequential block reads.
- max out at 71 random seeks per second.
- sequentially create 447 files per second.
- randomly create 2,001 files per second.
- sequentially read metadata from 288,111 files per second.
- randomly read metadata from 503,021 per second.
- sequentially delete 225 files per second.
- randomly delete 610 files per second.
Note that the metrics regarding file metadata operations are based off of the number of files on which we test (the -n flag). Since the value supplied to -n was the same on both servers (256), the results we get back are very similar (if not the same).
I will continue to benchmark various VPS and Cloud providers in order to ascertain IO performance from as many providers as possible.
