Friday December 08, 2006

Welcome France 24

France 24, a 24 hour news channel in French, English and Arabic, broadcast over terrestrial digital TV, satelite and the net, has been launched. It has arrived at the behest of Jacques Chirac to provide a French view on the world - He was rather annoyed at the predominance of the Anglo-Saxon news coverage of the Gulf War, for instance. For me, the arrival of this station is really good news (excuse the pun) as I'm trying to learn French and have been limited to output such as Radio France International which, although very good, is a lot less fun than 24 hour rolling news and comment for francophones and francophiles. Also, to some extent I share M. Chirac's reservations about global news media - though I do have some minor observations about France 24:

The logo. I think it very amusing that this is so close to being the negative of the logo of that great American firm, AT&T (See below, all trademarks are copyright of...you know the rest):

France 24 Logo	AT & T Logo

The Presenters. One can detect a certain ageism/sexism in the choice of staff. There seem to be two sorts:

• Extremely smartly dressed men of various generations.
• Complete babes (apologies for the americanism) who make dear Britney look as though she should be tossing body parts into a Shakespearian stew.

Britney Spears	Prototype France 24 Presenter

I hope that I am mistaken and the female staff will be allowed to age gracefully facing the camera with their surviving male colleagues.

The news loop. Its understandable - its only their second day and they rely largely on feeds from other agencies and networks but even with my short attention span I realised I was watching the same content twice. A slightly longer loop would be nice.

The big issue: The Technology. If you have Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player 9 then you are in for a real treat. If you use any other browser (I tried Mozilla and a newer Firefox) you are in for an incoherent mess that looks like this.

And as for my Solaris and Linux platforms? One life is too short to blend this site into the viewing experience of those operating systems. I hope that there are other people out there that have given or will give a fragment of theirs to this cause and could offer me guidance. For those who only want the video feed via Realplayer,

mms://live.france24.com/france24_fr.wsx

is the key, which is not immediately obvious, buried in the HTML source.

Optimisation for only one platform at this stage in the life of the channel seems an obvious decision: they are only 2 days old. On the other hand, there is no love loss between the French government and the evil empire of American IT corporations - France is developing a "Google rival" and has also taken a swipe at Apple. Microsoft has been mired in European Union anti-trust litigation for years.

Perhaps this emnity will bear fruit for those viewers amongst us who do not drink entirely from the fountain at Redmond. In the meantime I am profoundly grateful to the French taxpayers and the staff of France 24 for this Christmas gift.

Friday December 01, 2006

Filebench: A ZFS v VxFS Shootout

Overview

Here is an example of Filebench in action to give you an idea of its capabilities "out of the box" - a run through a couple of the test suites provided with the tool on the popular filesystems ZFS and VxFS/VxVM; I've given sufficient detail so that you can easily reproduce the tests on your own hardware. I apologise for the graphs, which have struggled to survive the Openoffice .odt -> .html conversion. I hadn't the energy to recreate all 24 of them from the original data

They summarize the differences between ZFS and VxFS/VM in a number of tests which are covered in greater detail further on . It can be seen that in most cases ZFS performed better at its initial release (in Solaris 10 06/06) than Veritas 4.1; in some cases it does not perform as well; but in all cases it performs differently. The aim of such tests is to give a feel for the differences between products/technologies so intelligent decisions can be made as to which file system is more appropriate for a given purpose.

It remains true however that access to the data will be more effective in helping decision makers reach their performance goals if these can be stated clearly in numerical terms. Quite often this is not the case.

Figure 1: Filebench: Testing Summary for Veritas Foundation Suite (ZFS = 0)

Hardware and Operating System

Solaris 10 Update 2 06/06 (inc. ZFS) running on a Sun Fire E6900 with 24 x 1.5 Ghz Ultrasparc IV+, 98 Gb RAM with storage comprising 4 x StorEdge 3500 JBOD (48 x 72 Gb disks) , Fiber attach (4 x 2 Gb PCI-X 133 MHz)

The software used was VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1, VERITAS File System 4.1, FileBench 1.64.5. For each Filebench test a brief description is given followed by a table which shows how it was configured for that test run. This enables you to reproduce the test on your hardware. Of course if you want greater detail on the tests, you have to download Filebench (see blogs passim).

Create & Delete

Creation and deletion of files is a metadata intensive activity which is key to many applications, especially in web-based commerce and software development.

Figure 2: Create/Delete - Operations per Second	Figure 3: Create/Delete - CPU uSec per Operation
Figure 4: Create/Delete - Latency (ms)

Copyfiles

This test creates two large directory tree structures and then measures the rate at which files can be copied from one tree to the other.

Figure 5: Copy Files - Operations per Second	Figure 6: Copy Files - CPU uSec per Operation
Figure 7: Copy Files - Latency (ms)

File Creation

This test creates a directory tree and fills it with a population of files of specified sizes. File sizes are chosen according to a gamma distribution of 1.5, with a mean size of 16k. The different workloads are designed to test different types of I/O - see generally the Solaris manual pages for open(2), sync(2) and fsync(3C).

Figure 8: File Creation - Operations per Second	Figure 9: File Creation - CPU uSec per Operation
Figure 10: File Creation - Latency (ms)

Random Reads

This test performs single-threaded random reads of 2 KB size from a file of 5 Gb.

Figure 11: Random Read - Operations per Second	Figure 12: Random Read - CPU uSec per Operation
Figure 13: Random Read - Latency (ms)

Random Writes

This test consists of multi-threaded writes to a single 5 Gb file.

Figure 14: Random Writes - Operations per Second	Figure 15: Random Writes - CPU uSec per Operation
Figure 16: Random Writes - Latency (ms)

Sequential Read

These tests perform a single threaded read from a 5 Gb file.

Figure 17: Sequential Read - Operations per Second	Figure 18: Sequential Read - CPU uSec per Operation
Figure 19: Sequential Read - Latency (ms)

Sequential Write

These tests perform single threaded writes to a 5 Gb file.

Figure 20: Sequential Write - Operations per Second	Figure 21: Sequential Write - CPU uSec per Operation
Figure 22: Sequential Write - Latency (ms)

Application Simulations: Fileserver, Varmail, Web Proxy & Server

There are a number of scripts supplied with Filebench to emulate applications:

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.

Varmail:

A /var/mail NFS mail server emulation, 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.

Web Proxy:

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. 16k is appended to the log for every 10 read/writes.

Web Server:

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. 16k is appended to the weblog for every 10 reads.

Figure 23: Application Simulations - Operations per Second	Figure 24: Application Simulations - CPU uSec per Operation
Figure 25: Application Simulations - Latency (ms)

OLTP Database Simulation

This database emulation performs transactions on a file system using the 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 (128Kb+) synchronous writes as occur in the database log file. It launches 200 reader processes, 10 processes for asynchronous writing, and a log writer. The emulation uses intimate shared memory (ISM) in the same way as Oracle which is critical to I/O efficiency (as_lock optimizations).

Figure 26: OLTP 2/8 Kb Blocksize - Operations per Second

Figure 27: OLTP 2/8 Kb Blocksize - CPU uSec per Operation

Figure 28: OLTP 2/8 Kb Blocksize - Latency (ms)

The summary figures above are the tip of a vast numerical iceberg of statistics provided by Filebench and wrappers around it which probe every system resource counter you can think of. It is a truism though that in using data like this, there is an enthusiasm to reduce it to single figures and simple graphs, leaving the engineers working on the performance bugs to the excruciating detail.

Remember also that these are the pre-packackaged scripts. The possibilities for custom benchmark workloads are as infinite as your imagination. Its also worth saying that technologies move on. The snapshot above will start to fade as improvements are made.