On Wed, 13 May 2009, Scott Carey wrote:

Can you do a quick and dirty memory bandwidth test? (assuming linux)

/sbin/hdparm -T /dev/sd<device>

...its not a very accurate measurement, but its quick and highlights relative hardware differences very easily.

I've found "hdparm -T" to be useful for comparing the relative memory bandwidth of a given system as I change its RAM configuration around, but that's about it. I've seen that result change by a factor of 2X just by changing kernel version on the same hardware. The data volume transferred doesn't seem to be nearly enough to extract the true RAM speed from (guessing the cause here) things like whether the test/kernel code fits into the CPU cache.

I'm using this nowadays:

sysbench --test=memory --memory-oper=write --memory-block-size=1024MB --memory-total-size=1024MB run

The sysbench read test looks similarly borked by caching effects when I've tried it, but if you write that much it seems to give useful results.

P.S. Too many Scotts who write similarly on this thread. If either if you are at PGCon next week, please flag me down if you see me so I can finally sort you two out.

--
* Greg Smith gsm...@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD

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