Performance Testing on Itanium server w/RHAS3.0

[Ian Derringer]

Greetings,
Does nayone here know where or how I can start running some performance testing on my Itanium server? The specs on the server as follow:
3x1.3GHz
16.0GB RAM
2x72.0GB RAID 0+1
RH Linux AS 3.0

We will be loading Oracle 10G on this box inventually. I would like to run some peformance test and such. Any ideas on how I should pursue?

Thank you in advance.

Ian D.

[Dave Falloon]

First place I would look is the linux benchmark home page:

http://lbs.sourceforge.net/

I've used bonnie++ before, it was pretty good.

hope that helps,

--Dave

[Ian Derringer]

Great! I will check it out and post my results.

Thanks so much!!

Ian D.

[Ian Vaughan]

Hi Ian,
I'm a bit confused about having raid 0+1 with only 2 disks? For performance I always go for a minimum of 8 disks, 2 mirrored striped sets of 4 disks. You can't beat having more physical spindles to spread the load over. Let us know how you get on.
regards
Ian

[Ian Derringer]

Ian - You're correct, only if you're talking about boot partition out on the SAN. As for me, I have setup that my OS and boot partition remain local with mirror drives for redundant.

[Dave Falloon]

But you can't have a RAID 0 stripe across two disks AND have a disk to mirror if you have only two disks, I think you mean you have a RAID 1 array, one disk and all its partitions mirrored to a second drive, unless you've done something funky like made a bunch of same sized partitions on one disk and then striped them as RAID 0 and then mirrored that disk to another disk ...

defeats the purpose of RAID 0 but its still possible.

Quick note: RAID 0 does not mean the same thing as "not in a raid array"

You'll get more performance out of three disks in RAID 0 or RAID 5, but a RAID 1 set will help increase the mean time between failure (MTBF, good acronym to feed bean counters) of the system.

I can pretty much tell you right now that disks or network is going to be the bottle neck on the server. Usually its disks, but lately I've seen more trouble feeding the network pipes to big disk arrays.

--Dave