Quick setup of Iozone benchmarking tool
Introduction
Iozone is an open source file system benchmarking tool which lets you to evaluate various aspects of a filesystem performance like read, write, rewrite, random read etc etc. It is ported to various platforms and can be run on all major operating systems like Linux, Microsoft Windows Mac OS X. Though it can be used for the detailed analysis of the filesytem IO performances, here we describe in short how to install it in Linux and get the analysis plotted to a graph.
How to install
1. Download the rpm source fro the Iozone from the following link or enter the follwing command at the command prompt
wget http://www.iozone.org/src/current/iozone-3-338.i386.rpm
2. install Iozone using the following command
rpm -ivh /path/to/iozone-3-338.i386.rpm
Now the filesystem benchmarking tool is installed. To verify the installation you can find the files of Iozone tool in the directory /opt/iozone/
Plotting a graph from Iozone analysis
For the plotting of a graph you should ensure that gnuplot is already installed in your machine. Gnuplot is a command-driven opensource function plotting tool. If it isn’t installed you may install it using the following command
yum install gnuplot
After ensuring that you have got gnuplot installed. Lets try plotting the analysis of the Iozone tool on a graph. Here we will analyze the filesystem with in auto mode. Run th iozone command and redirect its output to a file.
/opt/iozone/bin/iozone -a -g 4m > /tmp/test_analysis
In the above command we have set the maximum size of a file for auto mode to 4mb with -g option. For brief study about Iozone commands use
/opt/iozone/bin/iozone -h
To generate the graph there is another command which is installed with the iozone tool ie Generate_Graphs. To plot the graph use the following commands
/opt/iozone/bin/Generate_Graphs /tmp/test_analysis
A new window will pop up with the plotted graph of the write performance. At the command line if you hit enter then new graph is plotted fro the rewrite performance. Thus there will be graph plotted for many IO performances as you hit enter each time. Evaluate the required IO performances from the set of graphs depending on the application that you are planning to deploy.
Have a nice day 
it should be: /opt/iozone/bin/iozone -a -g 4m > /tmp/test_analysis
it showed up in my browser with a > and i guess it should be a greater than sign instead.
also, I used: fink install gnuplot for my mac.
thx! does anyone know how to save the graphs it makes without using excel? Or is there a way to plot it in different colors or as a surface in gnuplot using generate_graphs? how would i edit the source for generate_graphs?
“it showed up in my browser with a “& g t” no spaces and i guess it should be a greater than sign instead.”