ext3, ext2, vfat performance on RedHat Enterprise 4

[Bas Meijer]

Dear Speedfreaks,

Today I re-ran the filesystem tests on RehHat EL 4.
To get accurate results I went for "ceteris paribus":
same hardware, same disk sectors, same binaries, same config,
same order of steps. Everything the same except filesystem for database,
now on RHEL4.

The testscript below was executed with the three filesystems available 
on
RedHat Enterprise 4 which was installed for this test. Each time a newly
created filesystem was populated with a clean mysql database after that 
a sysbench test was run (first result were noted to eliminate cache 
effects).

CONCLUSION: RedHat does not offer the MySQL friendly journaling 
filesystems:
reiserfs, jfs, xfs; ext3's journaling is bad for mysql performance, 
yesterdays
tests on Suse showed that the other journaling filesystems perform 
better.


RESULTS             unit  ext3    ext2   vfat   average
restore time        secs  889.7   819.9  982.5  897.4
create 2mln myisam  secs   38.5    35.5   75.7   49.9
create 1mln myisam  secs   17.8    17.2   34.4   23.1
create 1mln innodb  secs   90.1    65.5  122.3   92.6
create 1mln bdb     secs   18.7    17.8   36.4   24.3
overall write score       103.1%  113.8%  86.9%


myisam tran/s       n/s   182.1   192.5  188.5  187.7
innodb tran/s       n/s    80.4    84.5   63.4   76.1
bdb tran/s          n/s   183.9   184.0  187.6  185.1
sysbench rw/s       n/s  3174.4  3450.1 3423.4 3349.3
myisam tran/s       n/s   112.7   204.0  206.7  174.5
overall trans. score       94.0%  103.6% 102.4%

overall performance        98.5%  108.7%  94.7%

NOTE
unit secs is time in seconds, less is better
unit n/s is number per second, more is better
percentages are compared to the average timing (100%).

TESTSCRIPT
mkfs -t xxx /dev/sda9
mount /dev/sda9 /test
cd /test
tar xf data.tar
mysql start
--mysql-table-type=myisam  --oltp-table-size=2000000 prepare
--mysql-table-type=myisam  --oltp-table-size=2000000 run
--mysql-table-type=myisam  --oltp-table-size=2000000 cleanup
mysql restart
--mysql-table-type=myisam  --oltp-table-size=1000000 prepare
--mysql-table-type=myisam  --oltp-table-size=1000000 run
--mysql-table-type=myisam  --oltp-table-size=1000000 cleanup
mysql restart
--mysql-table-type=bdb  --oltp-table-size=1000000 prepare
--mysql-table-type=bdb  --oltp-table-size=1000000 run
--mysql-table-type=bdb  --oltp-table-size=1000000 cleanup
mysql restart
--mysql-table-type=innodb  --oltp-table-size=1000000 prepare
--mysql-table-type=innodb  --oltp-table-size=1000000 run
--mysql-table-type=innodb  --oltp-table-size=1000000 cleanup
mysql benchmarks < mysql.dump


DETAILS
linux 2.6.9-5.ELsmp on RedHat Enterprise 4
sysbench 0.3.1 + 670Mb sql-dump on ext3 partition
database on 15k mirrored scsi disk partition
start 16488.620 end 18543.779  logical

standard arguments for sysbench:
time sysbench --mysql-user=root --mysql-db=benchmarks --num-threads=50 
--test=oltp


Bas Meijer