Thumper benchmarks

I ran some testing on the new thumpers using filebench. I tested Solaris 10 Update 5, all current patches installed, with ZFS. The machines have 48 250GB disks, configured as two root disks, 44 data disks, and two hotspares (unused in this test). It has 2 dual-core 2.8GHz Opterons and 16GB RAM.

I first tested with a workload designed to simulate the images workload on amane. This started 2 "uploader" threads; these deleted one file, created two new files (of a random size up to 1MB), then slept for 2 seconds. Concurrently, it started 100 "webservers" threads; these opened a random file, read its entire contents in 64KB blocks, then closed it.

I prepared the benchmark by creating 25,000 files in a filesystem, totalling about 25GB. Notice this size exceeds the system's RAM.

Over a 1200-second run, the system achieved 1MB/sec write performance (expected given the low workload) and 726MB/sec read performance. On average, 725 entire file reads per second was achieved (this suggests that file size did not greatly affect the performance; probably caused by ZFS's aggressive read-ahead).