PenguinoMeter : An Open Source File-I/O Benchmark for Linux

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Project Admins:

Ray Bryant (raybry@users.sourceforge.net)

Roger Sunshine (rsunshine@users.sourceforge.net)

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PenguinoMeter (also known as "pgmeter") is a file-I/O benchmark for Linux. It is designed to measure the rate at which data can be transferred to a file as opposed to the rate at which file-system operations (such as create file, find file, delete file, etc) can be performed. Pgmeter allows a flexible specification of the file-system workload to be measured. The workload specification is patterned after that of the Iometer benchmark available from Intel® Corporation. The current version of pgmeter can read configuration files created by Iometer and our studies indicate that pgmeter produces the same file-system workload as Iometer when it is given the same configuration file as input. (For details see: "PenguinoMeter: A New File-I/O Benchmark for Linux", by Ray Bryant, Dave Raddatz, and Roger Sunshine, to appear in
Proceedings of the 5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference, November 5-10, Oakland, Ca. A pre-publication version of this paper is available in html or pdf formats on this website.)

Unlike Iometer, pgmeter is open source and licensed under the GPL. Also unlike Iometer, pgmeter does not (yet) include any of the following:

A GUI. pgmeter is a command-line only program. However, one can use Iometer under windows to create and edit configuration files for use with pgmeter. With some practice, one can use a text editor under Linux to modify existing configuration files.
Support for "network targets". Iometer also supports benchmarking of network interfaces.
Support for "remote targets". Iometer provides support for benchmarking a disk attached to a remote computer.

Of course, because pgmeter is an open-source benchmark, other individuals can modify the source to remove the above restrictions or provide new features not available in Iometer. The purpose of this Source Forge® project is to provide a home for this open-source development effort. We welcome the pariticpation of and contributions of other individuals in this project.

Status

9/25/01    prototype GUI code completed
9/26/01    CVS tree populated (GUI code not included)
9/30/01    Web page constructed

Documentation

"PenguinoMeter: A New File-I/O Benchmark for Linux", by Ray Bryant, Dave Raddatz, and Roger Sunshine, to appear in
Proceedings of the 5th Annual Linux Showcase & Conference, November 5-10, Oakland, Ca. A pre-publication version of this paper is available in html or pdf formats on this website.