Software RAID and Encrypted Filesystem Benchmarks¶

questions¶

• What is the performance of RAID1 and RAID5?
• How much load do RAID1 and RAID5 put on the cpu?
• Does a busy bus affect RAID more than plain disks?
• What is the performance of dmcrypt and loopaes?
• How much load do dmcrypt and loopaes put on the cpu?
• What is the perfomance of software RAID combined with dmcrypt or loopaes?
• Which is the better scheduler, deadline or anticipatory?

hardware¶

HP Netserver lp1000r
Dual 933 Mhz CPU
1.75 GB RAM
3 × 74 GB SCSI, 10K RPM

software¶

kernel 2.6.8 single cpu
bonnie++
dm-crypt
loop-aes

tests¶

Both tests use bonnie++ to test the disks.

• Files Test: create, destroy, and stat 20,000 files in sequential and random order. File sizes are random between 0K and 15k. All files are created in a single directory.

• IO Test: read, write, rewrite, and seek in three 1GB size files.

• Load: all tests are starting with 0 cpu load. Load was then measured every 2 seconds for the duration of the test and averaged over all measurements.

overall¶

Overall, what it the relative penalty of RAID and an encrypted filesystem? This chart gives you some idea.

NOTE: Unfortunately, the tests for this chart were made using an un-optimized kernel, so it may exaggerate the expense of CPU intensive activity, such as software raid and encrypted filesystems. All the other tests on these pages were run with a 686 optimized kernel. Maybe someday we will re-run these as well.