Saturday, January 28, 2017

SD card benchmarking on raspberry pi

I have been reading about various SBCs (Single Board computers) to find a suitable one to build a NAS. While doing that, I remembered I own a Raspberry Pi 1 Model B SBC. Therefore I decided to try a torrent client on the raspberry pi to find out the capabilities of my old raspberry pi.

So, I used the latest raspbian lite image (2017-01-11-raspbian-jessie-lite.img) which is a nice headless distro suitable for my experiment on a Class 10 SD card ( Kingston 32GB SDHC SDC10G2/32GB).

Then I installed the transmission client daemon as the torrent client and added a private torrent which had a good healthy swarm. I left the torrent client keep running for a while and noticed that the download speed goes down to 0 time to time. I thought this was due to the behavior of the peers. however after observing the client for a while I understood it happened time to time with a pattern.

Then I used iostat command (comes with the sysstat package) to monitor the I/O behavior and found out that the I/O Wait goes about 100% when the download speed goes to 0. So there is a relationship between the write performance and the periodic download speed drops.

Therefore I decided to benchmark the write performance on the raspberry pi. The intention was just to study the performance of the write performance of the OS (VFS + File system ) and the raspberry pi hardware combination, not the SD card performance.

The tests were done using iozone tool with different test scenarios. Each scenario was tested for a 1000MB file with 25MB, 50 MB and 100MB record sizes.


File System
Disk Scheduling Algorithm
Ext4 with journal
noop
Ext4 without journal
noop
Ext4 with journal
deadline
Ext4 without journal
deadline
Ext4 with journal
cfq
Ext4 without journal
cfq


Then I plotted the read,write,random read and random write results using gnuplot.

According to the results,

  • write graphs shows that the raspberry pi can handle about 10000 KB write rate. There was no significant variance in the rate with the record size.
  • random write graph shows that the raspberry pi can handle 9000 KB write rate. It also shows that the higher rates can be achieved setting the higher record sizes.
  • read and random read graphs show that the raspberry pi can handle about 18000 KB read/random read rate. There was no significant variance in the rate with the record size. 

Therefore even though the SD card is class 10, that will not give you the actual SD card performance due to bottlenecks in Raspberry pi.


Write
Write 

Random Write
Random Write
Read
Read
Random Read
Random Read
This is how I prepared the SD card for the tests,

Prepare the SD card for raspberry pi

First write the raspbian image on to the SD card using dd command,

dd if=2017-01-11-raspbian-jessie-lite.img of=/dev/sdx

Then we need to create two partitions with and without ext4 journal for this experiment. However when raspberry pi boots at first time, it expands the file system automatically to consume all the free disk space in the SD card. In order to avoid that we should disable that feature.

For that, mount the SD card and edit cmdline.txt file located in the boot partition and remove the highlighted portion from the boot parameters.

dwc_otg.lpm_enable=0 console=serial0,115200 console=tty1 root=/dev/mmcblk0p2 rootfstype=ext4 elevator=deadline fsck.repair=yes rootwait quiet init=/usr/lib/raspi-config/init_resize.sh


Create 2 partitions for tests

Insert the SD card in to the raspberry pi and boot it. Now we are able to create the two partitions we want on the SD card.


root@raspberrypi:~# fdisk /dev/mmcblk0

Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.25.2).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.


Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 29 GiB, 31104958464 bytes, 60751872 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x244b8248

Device         Boot  Start     End Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1        8192  137215  129024   63M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2      137216 2715647 2578432  1.2G 83 Linux


Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (2 primary, 0 extended, 2 free)
   e   extended (container for logical partitions)
Select (default p): e
Partition number (3,4, default 3): 
First sector (2048-60751871, default 2048): 2715648
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (2715648-60751871, default 60751871): 

Created a new partition 3 of type 'Extended' and of size 27.7 GiB.

Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 29 GiB, 31104958464 bytes, 60751872 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x244b8248

Device         Boot   Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1         8192   137215   129024   63M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2       137216  2715647  2578432  1.2G 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p3      2715648 60751871 58036224 27.7G  5 Extended


Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (2 primary, 1 extended, 1 free)
   l   logical (numbered from 5)
Select (default p): l

Adding logical partition 5
First sector (2717696-60751871, default 2717696): 
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (2717696-60751871, default 60751871): +14G

Created a new partition 5 of type 'Linux' and of size 14 GiB.

Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 29 GiB, 31104958464 bytes, 60751872 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x244b8248

Device         Boot   Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1         8192   137215   129024   63M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2       137216  2715647  2578432  1.2G 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p3      2715648 60751871 58036224 27.7G  5 Extended
/dev/mmcblk0p5      2717696 32077823 29360128   14G 83 Linux


Command (m for help): n
Partition type
   p   primary (2 primary, 1 extended, 1 free)
   l   logical (numbered from 5)
Select (default p): l

Adding logical partition 6
First sector (32079872-60751871, default 32079872): 
Last sector, +sectors or +size{K,M,G,T,P} (32079872-60751871, default 60751871): 

Created a new partition 6 of type 'Linux' and of size 13.7 GiB.

Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/mmcblk0: 29 GiB, 31104958464 bytes, 60751872 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x244b8248

Device         Boot    Start      End  Sectors  Size Id Type
/dev/mmcblk0p1          8192   137215   129024   63M  c W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/mmcblk0p2        137216  2715647  2578432  1.2G 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p3       2715648 60751871 58036224 27.7G  5 Extended
/dev/mmcblk0p5       2717696 32077823 29360128   14G 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p6      32079872 60751871 28672000 13.7G 83 Linux


Command (m for help): w
The partition table has been altered.
Calling ioctl() to re-read partition table.
Re-reading the partition table failed.: Device or resource busy

The kernel still uses the old table. The new table will be used at the next reboot or after you run partprobe(8) or kpartx(8).


root@raspberrypi:~# partprobe /dev/mmcblk0

root@raspberrypi:~# lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM  SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
mmcblk0     179:0    0   29G  0 disk 
├─mmcblk0p1 179:1    0   63M  0 part /boot
├─mmcblk0p2 179:2    0  1.2G  0 part /
├─mmcblk0p3 179:3    0  512B  0 part 
├─mmcblk0p5 179:5    0   14G  0 part 

└─mmcblk0p6 179:6    0 13.7G  0 part 


Create file systems on the partitions

Create a ext4 file system without a journal,

root@raspberrypi:~# mkfs.ext4 -O ^has_journal /dev/mmcblk0p5
mke2fs 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
Discarding device blocks: done                            
Creating filesystem with 3670016 4k blocks and 917504 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 70fbac8c-4b68-4f53-aacb-12c2f84022ba
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208

Allocating group tables: done                            
Writing inode tables: done                            
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

Create another ext4 file system with default options,

root@raspberrypi:~# mkfs.ext4  /dev/mmcblk0p6
mke2fs 1.42.12 (29-Aug-2014)
Discarding device blocks: done                            
Creating filesystem with 3584000 4k blocks and 897600 inodes
Filesystem UUID: 3d5c4292-3aa6-49c8-a0e9-4fa7f0d484e3
Superblock backups stored on blocks: 
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208

Allocating group tables: done                            
Writing inode tables: done                            
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done 


Then mount the partitions,

mkdir /no_journal /with_journal

root@raspberrypi:~# cat /etc/fstab 
proc            /proc           proc    defaults          0       0
/dev/mmcblk0p1  /boot           vfat    defaults          0       2
/dev/mmcblk0p2  /               ext4    defaults,noatime  0       1
/dev/mmcblk0p5  /no_journal     ext4    defaults,noatime  0       0
/dev/mmcblk0p6  /with_journal   ext4    defaults,noatime  0       0

root@raspberrypi:~# mount -a



iozone utilitiy

Download iozone source code and compile it to build the tool.

wget http://www.iozone.org/src/current/iozone3_465.tar


Note: I changed  MAXBUFFERSIZE constant defined in the iozone.c file in order to have larger record sizes. by default it supports only for 16MB record sizes.

References,

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