Newsgroups: comp.benchmarks
Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watdragon!watsol.waterloo.edu!tbray
From: tbray@watsol.waterloo.edu (Tim Bray)
Subject: IOstone random file I/O benchmark (portable on UNIX, VMS & MS-DOS)
Message-ID: <1991Mar27.091604.10881@watdragon.waterloo.edu>
Keywords: IOstone benchmark portable UNIX VMS MS-DOS
Sender: daemon@watdragon.waterloo.edu (Owner of Many System Processes)
Organization: University of Waterloo
References: <4210@ryn.mro4.dec.com>
Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1991 09:16:04 GMT
Lines: 18

norcott@databs.enet.dec.com (Bill Norcott) writes:
 Attached is my PORTABLE version of Alvin Park's IOstone benchmark of 
 random acccess file I/O.
 *		[2] This program uses 4 megabytes of disk space.  Make
 *		sure that at least this much space is available on
 *		your file system before you run the program.

Don't know about MS/DOS, but on most modern Unix systems, and I'm pretty
sure on VMS too, lots of quick "seeks" in a 4-Mb file will result in
the whole file quickly migrating into the file system cache.

The results from this program are interesting and probably very useful
in predicting the performance of certain classes of application; what is
being measured is the efficiency of the filesys cache implementation;
the results are likely pretty well independent of the performance of the
underlying disk hardware.

Cheers, Tim Bray, Open Text Systems