

Ask HN: I'm working on some tests for Amazon EBS volumes. What do you think? - delano

I wanted a way to run automated tests on Amazon's Elastic Block Storage so I could compare performance for a single instance type over time and between Linux and Solaris. I also wanted to be able to run tests manually to check for performance degradation. I've been working on an EC2 deployment tool and I realized that I could use it to automate other kinds of workflows too. This week I finally put two and two together and created a really simple test workflow for EBS volumes.<p>Here's what I came up with:
http://gist.github.com/123400<p>Right now I'm only running Bonnie64 tests and only for small and large instances of Linux. There's also no fancy reporting, just Bonnie's txt output. My plan is to add other tests and then figure out something simple for reporting (Google Charts, probably). After that I'll add Solaris and other distros / machines sizes.<p>Do you have any suggestions for other tests/benchmarks to use? What do you think about the approach?
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gruseom
We're using EBS, so I'm interested.

You might consider posting your results in phases. People will probably have
good suggestions about what to test next.

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delano
That's a good idea. I could keep the Bonnie results in a git repo and create a
new branch for each version of the test configuration.

EDIT: Okay, I got a repo going with updated config and a report from a sample
run. I'm running some more significant tests now (up to 25GB) and you'll be
able to get the results from here: <http://github.com/solutious/ebstest/>

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delano
Here's an active link:

<http://gist.github.com/123400>

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critke
I stopped using EBS after the EC2 instance just stopped responding - twice -
each time after a few weeks. I was using an EBS volume for MySQL data storage.
I am not satisfied that this problem has been fixed. I suggest you look at
this thread before using EBS for production:
[http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/rss/rssmessag...](http://developer.amazonwebservices.com/connect/rss/rssmessages.jspa?threadID=28968)

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delano
That thread appears to be related to Debian (Lenny) and XFS only. Were you
using XFS or ext3?

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critke
Was using XFS on Ubuntu...

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SwellJoe
I'm just curious...what sort of workload are you dealing with that makes XFS a
rational choice? It's dramatically less well-tested than ext3, or even
ReiserFS, on Linux, and its performance characteristics are not particularly
compelling except for a few pretty specific cases.

I have a history of tinkering with odd filesystems, but I wouldn't deploy
anything other than ext3 to a production Linux server at this point in time.

