James E. Drews is a network administrator for the CAE Center of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Write to him at [email protected].
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We performed several system tests to analyze the servers' disk I/O and Web performance. Intel's Iometer 2003.02.15 (sourceforge.net/projects/iometer) provided a performance validation of the hard disk subsystems by generating I/O workload and performing a variety of simulated tasks. Spirent Communications WebAvalanche tests provided raw Web performance numbers under an untuned copy of Microsoft IIS.
Iometer Tests
We tested with three basic Iometer tests: database, maximum throughput and maximum I/O rate. The database test used a 2-KB transfer request size, with a mix of 67 percent reads and 33 percent writes. This proportion represents a typical database workload.
On the maximum throughput test, we used a 64-Kbps transfer request, and on the maximum I/O rate test, a 512-byte transfer request. On both tests we set the read/write distribution to 100 percent read and the random/sequential distribution to 100 percent sequential.
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