Orion: UFS vs ZFS testing questions

 

Hi all,

 

I have some questions about testing I did using the Orion tool against
UFS and ZFS.  We found that UFS was giving us better IOps results for
small IO, while ZFS was giving us better MBps for large sequential IO.
I was hoping that the list can help me figure out why.  First, are there
any issues using Orion to test these file systems? 

  

Test setup:

I attached the same SAN Lun to a Solaris 10 server as either a UFS or
ZFS mount point.  I was told that both file systems were setup using an
8K block size.  I created two 5G files on the file system, and ran the
following Orion command

 

orion_solaris64_sparc -run simple -testname <test_name> -num_disks 4 (<-
I just picked a random number here)

 

Results:

A sample section of the results are listed below.  We found that the UFS
system was giving us 722 IOps using 8k small random IOs, while the ZFS
system was giving us 361 IOps for the same test.  We found almost the
opposite results for 1M large sequential IO.  The results showed that we
were getting 35.33 MBps using UFS, and 84.04 MBps using ZFS.

 

Since we used the same SAN Lun for both tests, the only difference
between these two tests that I can think of is which file system we
used.  Can anyone give me any advice on what we might be doing wrong, or
help to explain the results we are seeing?

 

Thanks in advance

 

 

 

 

UFS:

Point 4 (small=3, large=0) of 29

ran (small): Index = 3  Count = 10850  Avg Lat =   5.53

ran (small): my   4 oth  0 iops 722 size 8 K lat   5.54 ms bw =   5.65
MBps dur  59.94 s READ  

 

Point 24 (small=0, large=3) of 29

ran (large): Index = 3  Count = 527  Avg Lat = 113.34

ran (large): my   4 oth   0 iops  35 size 1024 K lat 113.22 ms bw =
35.33 MBps dur  59.73 s READ 

 

 

ZFS:

Point 4 (small=3, large=0) of 29

ran (small): Index = 3  Count = 5431  Avg Lat =  11.04

ran (small): my   4 oth   0 iops 361 size 8 K lat  11.07 ms bw =   2.82
MBps dur  59.94 s READ

 

Point 24 (small=0, large=3) of 29

ran (large): Index = 3  Count = 1249  Avg Lat =  47.89

ran (large): my   4 oth   0 iops  84 size 1024 K lat  47.59 ms bw =
84.04 MBps dur  59.84 s READ

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