Ubuntu Manpage: getc_putc - program to test hard drive performance.

name
synopsis
description
options
output
author
signals
availability
see also

NAME

       getc_putc - program to test hard drive performance.

SYNOPSIS

       getc_putc [-d dir] [-s size(KiB)] [-m machine-name] [-u uid-to-use:gid-to-use] [-g gid-to-use]

DESCRIPTION

       This manual page documents briefly the getc_putc, program.

       This is a simple adjunct to the bonnie++ benchmark.  It is used to test various ways of doing IO one byte
       at a time, usually you don't need to do enough of this for it to be a performance issue for it to  matter
       much  which way you do it.  But sometimes it's necessary (for example whan parsing IO from a terminal and
       then launching another process which will take over all IO, such as a simple shell).

       The real benefits of this are to help settle some arguements about the performance of such things, and to
       educate novices about how bad per-byte IO really is.

OPTIONS

For getc_putc every option is of the form of a hyphen followed by a letter and then the next parameter
contains the value.

-d the directory to use for the tests.

-s the size of the file for byte IO performance measured in kilobytes. NB You can specify the size
in mega-bytes if you add 'm' to the end of the number.

The default for this test is to test with a 40MiB file. Of the file only 1/32 of it will be used
for write() and read() system calls (anything else takes too long), and only 1/4 of it will be
used for locked getc() and putc().

-m name of the machine - for display purposes only.

-u user-id to use. When running as root specify the UID to use for the tests. It is not recommended
to use root, so if you really want to run as root then use -u root. Also if you want to specify
the group to run as then use the user:group format. If you specify a user by name but no group
then the primary group of that user will be chosen. If you specify a user by number and no group
then the group will be nogroup.

-g group-id to use. Same as using :group for the -u parameter, just a different way to specify it
for compatibility with other programs.

-q quiet mode. If specified then some of the extra informational messages will be suppressed. Also
the csv data will be the only output on standard out and the plain text data will be on standard
error. This means you can run getc_putc -q >> file.csv to record your csv data.

OUTPUT

       The primary output is plain-text in 80 columns which is designed to fit well when pasted into  email  and
       which will work well with Braille displays.

       The  second  type  of  output  is  CSV  (Comma  Seperated  Values).  This can easily be imported into any
       spread-sheet or database program.

       For every test the result is a speed in KiB/s.  I do not display the CPU time because  it  presumably  is
       99% of the power of a single CPU (or something very close to that).

AUTHOR

       This   program,   it's   manual   page,   and   the   Debian   package  were  written  by  Russell  Coker
       <russell@coker.com.au>.

       The documentation, the Perl scripts, and all the code for testing the creation of thousands of files  was
       written by Russell Coker, but the entire package is under joint copyright with Tim Bray.

SIGNALS

       Handles  SIGINT and does a cleanup (which may take some time), a second SIGINT or a SIGQUIT will cause it
       to immidiately die.

       SIGXCPU and SIGXFSZ act like SIGINT.

       Ignores SIGHUP.

AVAILABILITY

       The source is available from http://www.coker.com.au/bonnie++ .

       See http://etbe.coker.com.au/category/benchmark for further information.