zcav(8) [debian man page]

zcav(8) 						      System Manager's Manual							   zcav(8)

NAME

       zcav - program to test raw hard drive throughput.

SYNOPSIS

       zcav  [-b  block-size[:chunk-size]] [-c count] [-r [first-block]:last-block] [-w] [-s skip-rate] [-u uid-to-use:gid-to-use] [-g gid-to-use]
       [-l log-file] [-f] file-name [-l log-file [-f] file-name]...

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page documents briefly the zcav, program.

       Modern hard drives have a constant rotational speed but have varying numbers of sectors per track (outside tracks are longer and have  more
       sectors).  This	is referred to as Zoned Constant Angular Velocity (or ZCAV). The outer tracks will have a higher data transfer rate due to
       having more sectors per track, these tracks generally have the lower track/sector numbers.

       This program tests the ZCAV performance of a hard drive, by reading the entire data on it a specified number of times. The file name  given
       as  the first parameter, it can be specified as -, for standard input. This file will be opened as read-only and in usual operation it will
       be /dev/hdX or /dev/ide/host0/busX/targetY/lun0/disc depending on whether you use devfs or not (NB operating systems other than Linux  will
       have different device names).

       The output should be able to be easily graphed with gnuplot which is what I use to view the results.

OPTIONS

       -b     the  size (in Meg) of the blocks to read/write (default 100M), optionally followed by a ':' and the chunk size for read/write opera-
	      tions (default 1M).  Note that the chunk size must be less than or equal to the block size and must also be significantly less  than
	      the size of the RAM in the machine.  Also note that for the write test there will be a fsync() after writing every chunk.

       -c     the number of times to read/write the entire disk.

       -r     the  range  of  data  (in Meg) to read/write on each pass (default the entire device).  Useful if you want to quickly test part of a
	      large drive.  If a single number is given then that is the last block to read, if two numbers then it's  the  start  and	end  of  a
	      range.  Values are in megs, but they are rounded down to the block size.

       -s     skip rate.  The option -s 10 will cause it to read every 10th block and skip the rest.

       -f     the  file-name  for  the input data. This isn't needed on well configured systems that have a recent Glibc where you can specify the
	      file name without the -f flag.

       -u     user-id to use.  When running as root specify the UID to run the tests as, it is not recommended to use root, so if you want to  run
	      as root use -u root.  Also if you want to specify the group to run as then use the user:group format.  If you specify a user by name
	      but no group then the primary group of that user will be chosen.	If you specify a user by number and no group then the  group  will
	      be nogroup.

       -g     group-id	to  use.   Same as using :group for the -u parameter, just a different way to specify it for compatibility with other pro-
	      grams.

       -w     write zero blocks to the disk instead of reading from the disk - will destroy data!

AUTHOR

       This program, it's manual page, and the Debian package were written by Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au>.

AVAILABILITY

       The source is available from http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++ .

       See http://etbe.coker.com.au/category/benchmark for further information.

																	   zcav(8)

getc_putc(8)						      System Manager's Manual						      getc_putc(8)

NAME

       getc_putc - program to test hard drive performance.

SYNOPSIS

       getc_putc [-d dir] [-s size(KiB)] [-m machine-name] [-u uid-to-use:gid-to-use] [-g gid-to-use]

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page documents briefly the getc_putc, program.

       This is a simple adjunct to the bonnie++ benchmark.  It is used to test various ways of doing IO one byte at a time, usually you don't need
       to do enough of this for it to be a performance issue for it to matter much which way you do it.  But sometimes it's necessary (for example
       whan parsing IO from a terminal and then launching another process which will take over all IO, such as a simple shell).

       The  real  benefits  of	this are to help settle some arguements about the performance of such things, and to educate novices about how bad
       per-byte IO really is.

OPTIONS

       For getc_putc every option is of the form of a hyphen followed by a letter and then the next parameter contains the value.

       -d     the directory to use for the tests.

       -s     the size of the file for byte IO performance measured in kilobytes.  NB You can specify the size in mega-bytes if you add 'm' to the
	      end of the number.

	      The  default  for  this  test  is to test with a 40MiB file.  Of the file only 1/32 of it will be used for write() and read() system
	      calls (anything else takes too long), and only 1/4 of it will be used for locked getc() and putc().

       -m     name of the machine - for display purposes only.

       -u     user-id to use.  When running as root specify the UID to use for the tests.  It is not recommended to use root,  so  if  you  really
	      want to run as root then use -u root.  Also if you want to specify the group to run as then use the user:group format.  If you spec-
	      ify a user by name but no group then the primary group of that user will be chosen.  If you specify a user by number  and  no  group
	      then the group will be nogroup.

       -g     group-id	to  use.   Same as using :group for the -u parameter, just a different way to specify it for compatibility with other pro-
	      grams.

       -q     quiet mode. If specified then some of the extra informational messages will be suppressed. Also the csv data will be the only output
	      on  standard  out  and the plain text data will be on standard error. This means you can run getc_putc -q >> file.csv to record your
	      csv data.

OUTPUT

       The primary output is plain-text in 80 columns which is designed to fit well when pasted into email and which will work well  with  Braille
       displays.

       The second type of output is CSV (Comma Seperated Values).  This can easily be imported into any spread-sheet or database program.

       For every test the result is a speed in KiB/s.  I do not display the CPU time because it presumably is 99% of the power of a single CPU (or
       something very close to that).

AUTHOR

       This program, it's manual page, and the Debian package were written by Russell Coker <russell@coker.com.au>.

       The documentation, the Perl scripts, and all the code for testing the creation of thousands of files was written by Russell Coker, but  the
       entire package is under joint copyright with Tim Bray.

SIGNALS

       Handles SIGINT and does a cleanup (which may take some time), a second SIGINT or a SIGQUIT will cause it to immidiately die.

       SIGXCPU and SIGXFSZ act like SIGINT.

       Ignores SIGHUP.

AVAILABILITY

       The source is available from http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++ .

       See http://etbe.coker.com.au/category/benchmark for further information.

SEE ALSO

       bonnie++(8), zcav(8)

																      getc_putc(8)