Pre-defined personalities

Workload personalities define the workload to apply to the system. Personalities usually include tunables for scaling workloads for specific systems. After loading a personality one can set tunables to appropriate values. Personalities are stored in files with .f extension and can be easily customized from either the Filebench command line interface or by editing the files themselves (or copies of the files). Filebench is shipped with a library of pre-defined workload personalities, which are described in the following sections.

Summary Table

=== Extended Explanation

Application Emulation

Application-Emulation Workloads Currently Available in Filebench package

varmail

A /var/mail NFS mail server emaulation, following the workload of postmark, but multi-threaded. The workload consists of a multi-threaded set of open/read/close, open/append/close and deletes in a single directory.

fileserver

A file system workload, similar to SPECsfs. This workload performs a sequence of creates, deletes, appends, reads, writes and attribute operations on the file system. A configurable hierarchical directory structure is used for the file set.

oltp

A database emulator. This workload performance transactions into a filesystem using an I/O model from Oracle 9i. This workload tests for the performance of small random reads & writes, and is sensitive to the latency of moderate (128k+) synchronous writes as in the log file. It by default launches 200 reader processes, 10 processes for asynchronous writing, and a log writer. The emulation includes use of ISM shared memory as per Oracle, Sybase etc which is critical to I/O efficiency (as_lock optimizations).

dss

DSS Database: this is future work TBD.

webserver

A mix of open/read/close of multiple files in a directory tree, plus a file append (to simulate the web log). 100 threads are used by default. 16k is appended to the weblog for every 10 reads.

webproxy

A mix of create/write/close, open/read/close, delete of multiple files in a directory tree, plus a file append (to simulate the proxy log). 100 threads are used by default. 16k is appended to the log for every 10 read/writes.

Micro-benchmark

copyfiles

A copy of a large directory tree. This workload creates a hierarchical directory tree, then measures the rate at which files can be copied from the source tree to a new tree. A single thread is used by default, although this is configurable.

createfiles

Create a directory tree and fill files. A populate of files of specified sizes a directory tree. File sizes are chosen according to a gamma distribution of 1.5, with a mean size of 16k.

randomread

A multi-threaded read of a single large file, defaulting to 8k reads. A single thread is used by default, although configurable by $nthreads.

randomwrite

A multi-threaded write of a single large file, defaulting to 8k writes. A single thread is used by default, although configurable by $nthreads.

singlestreamread

A sequential read of a large file. 1MB reads are used by default.

singlestreamwrite

A sequential write of a large file. 1MB writes are used by default.

multistreamwrite

A sequential read of 4 large files, each with their own reader thread. 1MB reads are used by default.

multistreamwrite

A sequential write of 4 large files, each with their own writer thread. 1MB writes are used by default.