blogbench

Improving HAMMER Performance

Submitted by Jeremy
on June 12, 2008 - 1:17am
DragonFlyBSD

"After another round of performance tuning HAMMER all my benchmarks show HAMMER within 10% of UFS's performance, and it beats the shit out of UFS in certain tests such as file creation and random write performance," noted DragonFly BSD creator Matthew Dillon, providing an update on his new clustering filesystem. He continued, "read performance is good but drops more then UFS under heavy write loads (but write performance is much better at the same time)." He then referred to the blogbench benchmark noting, "now when UFS gets past blog #300 and blows out the system caches, UFS's write performance goes completely to hell but it is able to maintain good read performance." Matthew then compared this to HAMMER:

"HAMMER is the opposite. It can maintain fairly good write performance long after the system caches have been blown out, but read performance drops to about the same as its write performance (remember, this is blogbench doing reads from random files). Here HAMMER's read performance drops significantly but it is able to maintain write performance. UFS's write performance basically comes to a dead halt. However, HAMMER's performance numbers become 'unstable' once the system caches are blown out."