Read / Write Disk Performance Testing in Bash
Recently I needed to quickly (and non-destructively) test the read / write performance of a flash drive of mine. Naturally, I turned my attention to my terminal. This post is me documenting what I did so that I can remember for next time :P
Firstly, to test the speed of a disk, we need some data to test with. Since lots of small files will inevitably cause slowdowns due to the overhead of writing the file metadata and inode information to the superblock, it makes the most sense to use one gigantic file rather than tons of small ones. Here's what I did to generate a 1 Gigabyte file filled with zeroes:
dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/testfile.bin bs=1M count=1024
Cool. Next, we need to copy it to the target disk and measure the time it took. Then, since we know the size of the file (1073741824 bytes, to be exact), we can calculate the speed at which the copy took place. Here's my first attempt:
time dd if=/tmp/testfile.bin >testfile.bin
If you run this, you might find that it doesn't take it very long at all, and you get a speed of something like ~250MiB / sec! While impressive, I seriously doubt that my flash drive has that kind of speed behind it. Typically, flash memory takes longer to write to and read from - and I'm pretty sure that it can't read from it that fast either. So what's going on?
Well, it turns out that Linux is caching the disk write operations in a buffer, and then doing them in the background for us. Whilst fine for ordinary operation, this doesn't give us an accurate representation of how fast it's actually writing to the disk. Thankfully, there's something we can do about this: Use the sync
command. sync
will flush all cached write operations to disk for us, giving us the actual time it took to write the 1 GiB file to disk. Here's the altered command:
sync;
time sh -c 'dd if=/tmp/testfile.bin >testfile.bin; sync'
Very cool! Now, we can just take the time it took and do some simple maths to calculate the write speed of our disk. What about the read speed though? Well, to test that, we'll first need to clear out the page cache - another one of Linux's (many) caches that holds portions of files that have recently been accessed for faster retrieval - because as before, we're not interested in the speed of the cache! Here's how to do that:
echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
With the correct cache cleared, we can test the read speed accurately. Here's how I did it:
time dd if=testfile.bin of=/dev/null
Fairly simple, right? At a later date I might figure out a way of automating this, but for the occasional use now and again this works just fine :)
Found this useful? Got a better way of doing it? Want to say hi? Post in the comments below!