but also provides the bandwidth used in its output. You can find ddrescue for CentOS in Dag's RPMForge repository.
As I said, dd only does sequential I/O but since it does not need a filesystem it is very useful to get a baseline/indication/magnitude/... for the performance of a disk. The next step is to put a filesystem on the device being tested. Then the second tool I use to test performance is iozone. You can also find prebuild rpms for CentOS in Dag's RPMForge repository.
I usually use iozone like this
iozone -e -i0 -i1 -i2 -+n -r 16k -s8g -t1Iozone has a look of options (that is part why I like it). If you do iozone -h you will get the complete list. I suggest you go over them when you start testing so you know all your options. But the example above shows enough to get started. The -e option adds the time of the flush operation to the results and the -+n disables the retest feature. The different -i options indicate the tests done by iozone, -i0 is the sequential write test (always needed), -i1 is sequential read and -i0 is random read and write. Another interresting test is the mixed read/write (-i8). The 3 remaining options are : -r 16k is the record (or block) size used, -s8g is the size of the data tested (8 GB in this case, remember the 2x RAM rule here) and -t1 is the amount of threads performing the test (in this case 1).
Depepding in the application you are planning to use you try to use iozone in a way that it mimics as close as possible the IO patterns of your real application. This means playing with the -i (the kind of test), the -r (block size) and -t (number of threads) options.
Other nice features of iozone are the autotest. Here iozone can iterate over different tests using different parameters for file size and record size. Also iozone can output its results in a Excell file, so you later make nice graphs of the tests.
The final test that I perform is a bit less scientific, but still a good indication of performance of a disk or a RAID array. The test is a copy of a directory that contains about 1GB of data. This data is stored in different subdirectories (I think it is about 5 levels deep) and all these subdirs contains either a couple of big files and for the rest a lot of small files.
This means that a copy of this directory involves a lot of metadata activity, and a mix of sequential I/O (the big files) and something that resembles random or mixed I/O (the small files). And the result is usually a big difference compared to the sequential speeds obtained with dd or iozone.
Now that we have all these benchmarks we still need a tool to monitor the system itself and see what is going on. The tool I always use for this is dstat. It is written and maintained by Dag of the RPMForge repo (and of course it also contains CentOS rpms of dstat). The nice thing about dstat is that is has different monitoring modules (and you can also write your own), its output formatting is really good and it can output the results in CSV files so you can also process the results in a spreadsheet. This is a example on how to use dstat :
dstat -c -m -y -n -N eth2,eth3 -d -D sda -i -I 98 3All the diferent output are different output modules and they get display in the order you have put them on the commandline. With the (for example) -n -N structure you can specifiy for which devices you would like to see output. In this case the -n refers to network-card statistics and with -N I specified I would like to see the output for eth2 and eth3. A similar systems is used for the disk statistics (-d and -D) and number of interrupts (-i and -I).
----total-cpu-usage---- ------memory-usage----- ---system-- --net/eth2- --dsk/sda-- inter
usr sys idl wai hiq siq| used buff cach free| int csw | recv send| read writ| 98
0 0 100 0 0 0| 190M 195M 924M 2644M|1029 92 | 0 0 | 793B 4996B| 14
0 0 99 1 0 0| 190M 195M 924M 2644M|1008 41 | 21B 0 | 0 23k| 1
To get the list of extra modules available next to the standard onces do this :
dstat -M listFor more information about all the different dstat options do dstat -h or refer to the dstat man-page.