Benchmark observations

Switching this little prog to make files instead of directories was the work of about three lines of code. No biggie. Comparing it to the Directory make, there are a couple of observations I can make when running against NetWare/NSS onna SAN:

• MKDIR seems to be more server-CPU intensive than TOUCH by quite a bit. During the long MKDIR test CPU was noticibly higher than ambient, but the TOUCH test barely twitched the needle. Hmmm.
• MKDIR is a faster operation than TOUCH, from a client's perspective.
• Directories are faster to enumerate than files.
• Enumeration operations are sensitive to network latency. When the client is busy, enumeration gets noiser.
• Both create and enumerate are sensitive to client CPU loads.
• Enumeration is much faster than create, by about four orders of magnitude.
• At least Directory Create time does trend upwards over time depending on how many objects are in the parent directory. Though this is is only really visible when going well above 100,000 directories, and is very slight; 2.049ms at 2000 dirs and 2.4159ms at 500K dirs. Haven't tested files yet.
  

Both tests were run on a directory with Purge Immediate set. For a REASON. In the actual benchmark I'll probably also set PI, so I'm not filling the slack space with deleted files and have to explain away a mid-benchmark performance drop when the server has to expire off the oldest files/directories.

Tags: benchmarking