Benchmarking disk IO on ext3 vs ext4 vs xfs with fio

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 07:15:05 +0000

With the old database phased out, I figured this was a good time to benchmark IO on it before either repurposing it or mothballing it. In the past I’ve used dd for elementary sequential read/write testing, but I recently found fio which is much more versatile. Apparently developed by FusionIO, fio lets you control concurrency, blocksize and many other parameters and reports lots more data, most notably IOPS.

I created 4 fio config files, basically the same as the one below, for direct / buffered disk access and sequential / random writes. All have 8k blocksize since that’s what Postgres uses by default.

Msa 70 on Evan Hoffman

Benchmarking disk IO on ext3 vs ext4 vs xfs with fio