Many bad things can be said about benchmarks but they are useful to have some understanding about the thing involved. This benchmark is no different. Take it for what it’s worth.

The setup is as follows. A 1TB iSCSI volume is formatted with OCFS2. This iSCSI volume is mounted on 3 machines running Debian. Numbers are taken after running bonnie++ on the mounted iSCSI volume at the same time on the 3 machines simultaneously. 3 machines are connected to a Dell PowerConnect 3450 switch with CAT6 cables (1Gbps) and iSCSI device is connected to the same switch with a CAT6 cable (1Gbps). Speed in the graph K/sec is Kilo-bytes per second.

Machine A (Dell PowerEdge R410) – bonnie++ version 1.03d. 2 Quad Core Intel Xeon @ 2.27GHz (with HT OS sees 16 CPUs) with 32GB RAM.

	Sequential output						Sequential input				Random
	Per chr		Block		Rewrite		Per chr		Block		Seeks
Size	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU
63G	21049	39	46081	14	20134	6	58457	91	107392	13	537.5	1
	Sequential create						Random create
	Create		Read		Delete		Create		Read		Delete
files	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU
16	468	28	+++++	+++	10862	44	2377	83	+++++	+++	6713	63

Machine B (Dell PowerEdge 1950)- bonnie++ version 1.96. 2 Core 2 Duo Intel Xeon 3.20GHz (with HT OS sees 8 CPUs) with 10GB RAM.

	Sequential output						Sequential input				Random
	Per chr		Block		Rewrite		Per chr		Block		Seeks
Size	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU
19904M	102	99	22214	10	4159	1	272	93	45714	4	213.4	0
	Sequential create						Random create
	Create		Read		Delete		Create		Read		Delete
files	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU
16	388	12	+++++	+++	3964	13	731	25	+++++	+++	3139	58

Machine C (Dell PowerEdge 1950) – bonnie++ version 1.03d. 2 Core 2 Duo Intel Xeon 3.20GHz (with HT OS sees 8 CPUs) with 10GB RAM.

	Sequential output						Sequential input				Random
	Per chr		Block		Rewrite		Per chr		Block		Seeks
Size	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	K/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU
20G	13949	28	34214	13	5771	2	26713	47	53736	7	153.0	0
	Sequential create						Random create
	Create		Read		Delete		Create		Read		Delete
files	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU	/sec	%CPU
16	461	30	+++++	+++	8116	60	2085	85	+++++	+++	4714	71

Have to perform another benchmark with 3 identical servers and the same version of the program. On a later date…

Another interesting file system is GFS by RedHat. In Debian, configuring GFS turned out to be a royal pain in the arse. Documentation on GFS says, “current supported maximum size of a GFS/GFS2 file system is 25 TB” and “maximum number of nodes supported in a Red Hat Cluster deployment of GFS/GFS2 is 16″. Feh.