tools

Benchmark Tools

We use smallfile, fio and iozone as the tools for testing the distributed file systems, since they have certain advantages specifically for testing distributed file systems as recognized in this post.

The tools are containerized to emulate the working environment of real workloads. Besides, it also facilitates the portability of the tools.

Pre-requisite

• Docker must be installed
• The kernel module(s) for the target filesystem (if any) must be loaded
• The container must run with --privileged in order to access system resources

Build Docker image

The ./build.sh is used for building the docker image and pushing it to Docker Hub under the dchampion24 namespace. The usage is as below:

$ ./build.sh <build|push|build-and-push(default)> <tool(default: iozone)> 

Container usage

The tool container reads the following parameters from the environment variables.

FS_TYPE     Filesystem type (*e.g.*, nfs, ceph, glusterfs)
FS_HOST     The hostname/IP address of the target filesystem endpoint 
FS_DIR      The exported directory on the target filesystem (default: /)
FS_OPTS     The mount options (optional)
MOUNTPOINT  The mount point (default: /mnt) 

The target file system will be mounted to the MOUNTPOINT, and the container will then use it as the working directory.