Measuring disk I/O
Adam Vande More
amvandemore at gmail.com
Wed Nov 18 22:03:26 UTC 2009
On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 3:54 PM, Steve Bertrand <steve at ibctech.ca> wrote:
> Nerius Landys wrote:
> > A friend and I are working on a small video-game related project as a
> > hobby. We're running several scripts 24/7 that make lots of calls to
> > a MySQL database. The mysql server process shows an average CPU use
> > of 1% (reported by top) and it never goes above about 2% The tables
> > it's hitting are myisam tables. I'm a little bit worried that the
> > mysql process is using a lot of disk access. I don't know too much
> > about hard disks but my feeling is that too much disk use could slow
> > the machine down or cause a premature hard disk failure. WD Raptor
> > model.
> >
> > I don't know if my concerns are well-founded, but I would like to
> > measure impact on the hard disk somehow. I don't know how to see disk
> > I/O. I do know how to use top. How do I measure disk I/O? Any other
> > thoughts?
>
> Perhaps gstat(8) will help you get started:
>
> # gstat -a
>
> dT: 1.001s w: 1.000s
> L(q) ops/s r/s kBps ms/r w/s kBps ms/w %busy Name
> 4 176 114 10261 14.9 62 607 25.4 96.8| ar0
> 4 177 115 10389 17.8 62 607 26.5 100.0| ar0.eli
> 1 34 34 527 30.8 0 0 0.0 99.1| ar0.elie
> 2 66 4 16 20.5 62 607 26.6 98.0| ar0.elif
> 1 77 77 9845 12.1 0 0 0.0 93.0| ar0.elig
>
> ...or on ZFS:
>
> # zpool iostat 1
>
> capacity operations bandwidth
> pool used avail read write read write
> ---------- ----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----
> storage 1.39T 440G 0 771 0 96.4M
> storage 1.39T 440G 0 1.05K 4.42K 126M
>
> Steve
>
>
systat -io is a nice visualization.
If you're really io bound there are some things you can do config wise to
help. However if you really are pushing a lot data, you need to be running
scsi or ssd drives. It takes A LOT of striped sata drives to match the
performance of a single good 15K scsi. if you're able to run ahci, that
will help some as well.
--
Adam Vande More
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