DiskPerf for HP-UX

What is DiskPerf?

DiskPerf performs performance characterizations of your HP 9000's I/O system and attached disk drives and related storage subsystems. It tells you how fast your disks are, how fast your system can transfer data from them, and just how well those fancy disk arrays are actually performing.

With DiskPerf, you can finally get visibility into the physical I/O capabilities of your system's hardware and capabilities. Your storage vendors tell you that their disk system is fast, but how do you really know? Before DiskPerf, you had to rely on application level performance measurements and overall system performance tools which don't tell you much (if anything) about what your hardware is really doing because they measure performance of the system as a whole, rather than the I/O subsystem specifically.

DiskPerf can help pinpoint problem (slow) disk drives. In the example below, we see that DISK 3 (with /home) is slower than DISK 1 (which has /, /var, /usr, /tmp, and /opt). Thus, DISK 3 is a good candidate for replacing.

All of DiskPerf's operations are non-destructuve and the program can be run with users on the system.

Some of the measurements that DiskPerf can perform include:

Serial Access
Random Access
Worst-case Access

DiskPerf can test a single drive at a time (allowing you to determine the maximum performance possible with the drive, channel, and CPU), or multiple drives at a time (allowing you to determine maximum system throughput with the drives, channels and CPU(s)).

DiskPerf has an online help facility, and a history stack.

DiskPerf is also available for the MPE/iX Operating System, here.

Downloads

Free Demo!

Example

Oz(su) /: /opt/allegro/bin/diskperf

DiskPerf [20001108]                Copyright (c) 2000 Allegro Consultants, Inc.

# disks: 2;  # filesystems: 6
Found 2 Volume Groups

DiskPerf: dstat

DISK  Hardware Path          MBs    Device name   FileSystem(s)
----: ------------------ : -------  ------------  -------------
   1: 10/0.0.0           :   4,095  c0t0d0        /  /var  /usr  /tmp  /opt 
   3: 10/4/4.3.0         :   8,683  c3t3d0        /home

Mounted Filesystems:
   /                          : hfs   : /dev/vg00/lvol1
   /var                       : hfs   : /dev/vg00/lvol8
   /usr                       : hfs   : /dev/vg00/lvol7
   /tmp                       : hfs   : /dev/vg00/lvol6
   /opt                       : hfs   : /dev/vg00/lvol5
   /home                      : hfs   : /dev/vg01/lvol1

DiskPerf: test all

Test will take about 2.0 minutes...

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Opened disk /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0 (DISK 1)
  cRandom   of DISK 1; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :     70.5 rd/sec
  Same      of DISK 1; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :    911.8 rd/sec
  Serial    of DISK 1; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :   1153.1 rd/sec
  Serial100 of DISK 1; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :   1165.3 rd/sec
  Steady1MB of DISK 1; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :    141.3 rd/sec
  cWorst    of DISK 1; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :     42.6 rd/sec
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Opened disk /dev/rdsk/c3t3d0 (DISK 3)
  cRandom   of DISK 3; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :     75.8 rd/sec
  Same      of DISK 3; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :    682.5 rd/sec
  Serial    of DISK 3; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :    686.9 rd/sec
  Serial100 of DISK 3; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :    689.0 rd/sec
  Steady1MB of DISK 3; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :    160.5 rd/sec
  cWorst    of DISK 3; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1 :     61.0 rd/sec
------------------------------------------------------------------------

     |      Random        |      Serial        |
DISK |   Best    Average  |   Best    Average  |  Device name
---- | --------  -------- | --------  -------- |  ----------------
   1 |     72.5      70.5 |   1185.8    1153.1 |  /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0
   3 |     76.2      75.8 |    695.8     686.9 |  /dev/rdsk/c3t3d0


...

DiskPerf: serial 3 maxsec 20
(will test each for 20 seconds)

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Serial of DISK 3; 1 page(s) per read; start at 1
(DISK 3 = /dev/rdsk/c3t3d0)
DISK    3:    686.3 Serial reads/sec [3501; 3,500]
DISK    3:    691.7 Serial reads/sec [7001; 7,000]
DISK    3:    695.8 Serial reads/sec [10501; 10,500]
DISK    3:    657.4 Serial reads/sec [13801; 13,800]
(stopped by maxsecs; total reads 13,800)

Total read rate:
DISK    3:    682.8 Serial reads/sec [ ; 13,800]

DiskPerf: quit

For more info, or a free demo, email us at: info@allegro.com