Ceph Benchmark Tools, Part III

In this article, we will take a look at another benchmark utility, fio (Flexible I/O Tester). It is not provided by Ceph, but it can be used on more general environments including Ceph environments. In the second part of the article, we will give benchmark results with fio benchmark utility on various setup: on local disk, Ceph RBD mount, and CephFS mount to show how this utility can be used for each setup.

fio utility

On Ubuntu 22.04, you can obtain the fio tool using apt install.

sudo apt install -y fio

The version at the time when this article is written is 3.28–1. It has a lot of options, but these are what we are interested for our simple benchmarks.

fio -filename=[path to file] -name=[job name]
-direct=1        # use non-buffered I/O
-rw=read         # (rand)read/(rand)write/(rand)rw
-bs=4k           # block size in bytes
-size=1G         # The total size of file I/O for each thread of this job.
-numjobs=16      # Create the specified number of clones of this job. 
-runtime=10      # in seconds
-group_reporting # the final report per-group instead of per-job

The following screenshot shows an example of outputs.

fio output from a read benchmark

Various Benchmarks