benchmarking Archives

Notes on tuning postgres for cpu and memory benchmarking

Published: October 18, 2024 (Updated: October 18, 2024) in Postgres, Database Performance, tpc-c, hammerDB, postgres, tuning, benchmarking by gary. Leave a Comment on Notes on tuning postgres for cpu and memory benchmarking.

Recently I wanted to measure the impact of NUMA placement and Hugepages on the performance of postgres running in a VM on a Nutanix node. To do this I needed to drive postgres to do real transactions but have very little jitter/noise from the filesystem and storage. After reading a lot of blogs I came […]

Running the ML-Perf Storage benchmark on Nutanix files.

Published: September 15, 2023 (Updated: October 10, 2023) in Workloads & Benchmarks, mlperf, benchmarking, ml, mlcommons, publication by gary. Leave a Comment on Running the ML-Perf Storage benchmark on Nutanix files..

Some technical notes on our submission to the benchmark committee. Background For the past few months engineers from Nutanix have been participating in the MLPerftm Storage benchmark which is designed to measure the storage performance required for ML training workloads. We are pleased with how well our general-purpose file-server has delivered against the demands […]

Advanced X-Ray: reducing runtime by re-using VMs.

Published: October 5, 2020 (Updated: July 14, 2021) in X-Ray, benchmarking, xray by gary. Leave a Comment on Advanced X-Ray: reducing runtime by re-using VMs..

How to speed up your X-ray benchmark development cycle by re-using/re-cycling benchmark VMs and more importantly data-sets.

Microsoft diskspd. Part 2 How to bypass NTFS Cache.

Published: April 7, 2020 (Updated: April 2, 2021) in diskspd, windows, benchmarking, diskspd by gary. Leave a Comment on Microsoft diskspd. Part 2 How to bypass NTFS Cache..

How to ensure performance testing with diskspd is stressing the underlying storage devices, not the OS filesystem.

Microsoft diskspd. Part 1 Preparing to test.

Published: March 30, 2020 (Updated: February 23, 2023) in diskspd, diskspd, storage, windows, benchmarking by gary. Leave a Comment on Microsoft diskspd. Part 1 Preparing to test..

How to install and setup diskspd before starting your first performance tests and avoiding wrong results due to null byte issues.

Why does my SSD not issue 1MB IO’s?

Published: March 13, 2020 (Updated: April 3, 2024) in Storage Performance, linux, benchmarking, ssd, storage, kernel by gary. Leave a Comment on Why does my SSD not issue 1MB IO’s?.

First things First Why do we tend to use 1MB IO sizes for throughput benchmarking? To achieve the maximum throughput on a storage device, we will usually use a large IO size to maximize the amount of data is transferred per IO request. The idea is to make the ratio of data-transfers to IO requests […]

HammerDB: Avoiding bottlenecks in client.

Published: October 4, 2019 (Updated: January 3, 2023) in Database Performance, hammerDB, database, benchmarking, sqlserver by gary.

How to avoid bottlenecks in the client generator when measuring database performance with HammerDB

Paper: A Nine year study of filesystem and storage benchmarking

Published: May 6, 2019 (Updated: January 3, 2023) in Storage Performance, paper, benchmarking by gary.

A 2007 paper, that still has lots to say on the subject of benchmarking storage and filesystems. Primarily aimed at researchers and developers, but is relevant to anyone about to embark on a benchmarking effort. The authors are clear on why benchmarks remain important: “Ideally, users could test performance in their own settings using real […]