Skip to content

Home

Jump to bottom
Vasily Tarasov edited this page Mar 2, 2017 · 42 revisions

Introduction

Filebench is a file system and storage benchmark that can generate a large variety of workloads. Unlike typical benchmarks it is extremely flexible and allows to specify application's I/O behavior using its extensive Workload Model Language (WML). Users can either describe desired workloads from scratch or use (with or without modifications) workload personalities shipped with Filebench (e.g., mail-, web-, file-, and database-server workloads). Filebench is equally good for micro- and macro-benchmarking, quick to setup, and relatively easy to use.

Quick start guide

To quickly introduce a new user to Filebench we use two examples that demonstrate two different typical Filebench work flows: 1) describe a user-defined workload in [WML](Workload Model Language) and generate the workload; 2) generate one of the predefined Filebench workloads. In both cases one first needs to install Filebench. It is as simple as downloading the release tarball, unpacking it, and then running traditional configure, make, and sudo make install commands. It is a bit more complicated if you want to build Filebench from the sources in git repository and you can read more about it [here](Building Filebench).

The description in this guide assumes that you use Filebench 1.5-alpha1 or higher.

Example 1: User-defined workloads

First step is to create the description of the workload (so called workload personality) in WML language. Typically, workload personalities are stored in files with .f extension. In this example we describe a very simple workload consisting of two processes with three threads each. Every thread continuously picks a file among many, reads it, and then closes the file. Here is the corresponding workload personality:

01  define fileset name="testF",entries=10000,filesize=16k,prealloc,path="/tmp"
02
03  define process name="readerP",instances=2 {
04    thread name="readerT",instances=3 {
05      flowop openfile name="openOP",filesetname="testF"
06      flowop readwholefile name="readOP",filesetname="testF"
07      flowop closefile name="closeOP"
08    }
09  }
10
11  run 60

Four main entities in Filebench are filesets, processes consisting of threads, and flowops. In the first line we define a fileset containing 10,000 files of 16KiB size each in /tmp directory. Filebench is instructed to _prealloc_ate all files in the fileset before executing the actual workload.

In the third and fourth lines we define two identical processes each consisting of three identical threads. Every thread in Filebench repeats flowops (operations) defined in it in a loop. Lines 05-07 describe the flowops that constitute the threads: open a file in "testF" fileset, read the file completely, and close it. Finally, in the 11th line we indicate to run the workload for 60 seconds.

In more complex workloads one can define any number of filesets, multiple different processes and threads, use a variety of flowops and attributes, and more. Refer to [complete WML vocabulary](Workload Model Language) for ultimate details and to Features page for a short summary of all features.

Assuming that the personality is saved in readfiles.f file, one can then generate corresponding workload by running filebench -f readfiles.f command.

Example 2: Pre-defined workloads

Filebench comes with several predefined micro- and macro-workloads (e.g., webserver, fileserver, mailserver) which are also described in WML, not differently than the workload in Example 1 above. In the source code tree, workloads are located in the workloads/ directory and are typically installed in /usr/local/share/filebench/workloads/ during make install (though this can differ from one installation to another).

We do not recommend to directly use workload files from workloads/ or /usr/local/share/filebench/workloads/ directories. The main reason is that these workloads are not properly sized (e.g., in terms of the dataset sizes) to a particular system. For instance, the initial dataset size of the webserver workload is only slightly larger than 16MiB, which is typically not the size you want to test the system containing multiple gigabytes of RAM with.

So, instead, copy webserver workload to any other directory:

cp /usr/local/share/filebench/workloads/webserver.f mywebserver.f

Then edit the copied file to increase the dataset size by setting the number of files (entries attribute of a fileset) to an appropriate value. Finally, run the workload:

filebench -f mywebserver.f

Scaling Filebench workloads page contains extended discussion on how to scale Filebench workloads.

Support

Use GitHub's issue tracking system to ask questions about Filebench, report bugs, or request new features. Issues is the central hub for both user support and bug tracking.

Useful Resources

Clone this wiki locally