Some Linux performance testing commands

ByConan

This short tutorial mentions some Linux performance testing commands to measure server/VPS performance. This will be added gradually as soon as I have more tools to test 🙂

1. Test disk IO:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 15.1643 s, 70.8 MB/s

2. Test disk IO with ioping

First, we need to install ioping (current version is 0.8):

wget https://github.com/koct9i/ioping/archive/v1.0.tar.gz
tar zxvf v1.0.tar.gz
cd ioping-1.0
make
make install

Or you can simply download the package for CentOS 7 at http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/i/ and install it with

rpm -Uvh http://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/i/ioping-1.0-1.el7.x86_64.rpm

. After that, we can use ioping instead of heavy / abusing dd command:

  • Measure disk seek rate (iops, avg):
    [root@flkvm ioping-0.8]# ioping -R /dev/sda
--- /dev/sda (device 40.0 GiB) ioping statistics ---
66 requests completed in 3.0 s, 23 iops, 92.1 KiB/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 3.4 ms / 43.4 ms / 259.7 ms / 55.3 ms
    [root@mynvme ~]# ioping -R /dev/vda
--- /dev/vda (block device 25 GiB) ioping statistics ---
29.8 k requests completed in 2.84 s, 116.5 MiB read, 10.5 k iops, 40.9 MiB/s
generated 29.8 k requests in 3.00 s, 116.5 MiB, 9.94 k iops, 38.8 MiB/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 75.5 us / 95.4 us / 1.41 ms / 15.4 us
  • Measure disk sequential speed (MiB/s):
    [root@flkvm ioping-0.8]# ioping -RL /dev/sda
--- /dev/sda (device 40.0 GiB) ioping statistics ---
60 requests completed in 3.0 s, 23 iops, 5.8 MiB/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 2.1 ms / 43.1 ms / 269.2 ms / 61.1 ms
    [root@mynvme ~]# ioping -RL /dev/vda
--- /dev/vda (block device 25 GiB) ioping statistics ---
10.0 k requests completed in 2.88 s, 2.45 GiB read, 3.48 k iops, 869.9 MiB/s
generated 10.0 k requests in 3.00 s, 2.45 GiB, 3.34 k iops, 835.5 MiB/s
min/avg/max/mdev = 186.5 us / 287.4 us / 10.8 ms / 214.1 us

3. Test with pre-built script

[root@bluevm ~]# wget https://freevps.us/bench.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
CPU model : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E3-1270 V2 @ 3.50GHz
Number of cores : 7
CPU frequency : 500.019 MHz
Total amount of ram : 128 MB
Total amount of swap : 128 MB
System uptime : 26 min,
Download speed from CacheFly: 30.8MB/s
Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA: 33.7MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX: 16.5MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 6.95MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, NL: 9.05MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL: 14.0MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 4.69MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA: 11.6MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA: 16.5MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC: 55.4MB/s
I/O speed : 504 MB/s

OR

root@eubackup ~ # wget tienle.com/networktest.sh -O - -o /dev/null|bash
CPU model : Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz
---- Number of cores : 8
---- CPU frequency : 1600.000 MHz
Total amount of RAM : 15955 MB
Total amount of SWAP : 8191 MB
System UPTIME: 183 days, 2:53,
Download speed from CacheFly: 60.9MB/s

==============================================================
# America Test #
==============================================================

Download speed from Coloat, Atlanta GA, USA: 13.8MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Dallas, TX, USA: 12.8MB/s
Download speed from Vultr, Los Angeles, CA, USA: 6.03MB/s
Download speed from Vultr, Silicon Valley, CA, USA: 479KB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, San Jose, CA, USA: 9.62MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Chicago, IL, USA: 6.59MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Seattle, WA, USA: 9.70MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Washington, DC, USA: 2.39MB/s
Download speed from Vultr, New Jersey, USA: 14.4MB/s
Download speed from OVH, Beauharnois, Canada: 11.5MB/s
Download speed from Azure, Sao Paulo, Brazil: 6.12MB/s

==============================================================
# EU and UK Test #
==============================================================

Download speed from Linode, London, UK: 63.8MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Frankfurt, DE: 17.4MB/s
Download speed from Leaseweb, Haarlem, NL, West EU: 61.2MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Rotterdam, NL, West EU: 36.8MB/s
Download speed from i3d.net, Ireland, North EU: 45.1MB/s
Download speed from OVH, Roubaix, FR: 56.4MB/s
Download speed from Prometeus, Milan, IT: 9.08MB/s

==============================================================
# Oceania & Asia Test #
==============================================================

Download speed from Azure, New South Wales, Australia East: 1.65MB/s
Download speed from Azure, Victoria, Australia Southeast: 1.20MB/s
Download speed from Softlayer, Singapore: 4.56MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Singapore: 7.41MB/s
Download speed from Linode, Tokyo, JP: 7.12MB/s
Download speed from Azure, Hong Kong, CN: 4.88MB/s
Download speed from Azure, Shanghai, CN:
Download speed from Azure, Beijing, CN:

==============================================================
# Disk IO Test #
==============================================================

I/O speed : 141 MB/s

4. Other useful commands for checking Linux server:

  • Check memory usage:
    free -m
  • Check disk usage:
    df -h
  • Check inodes usage:
    df -i
  • Find most consumed inodes folders:
    find / -xdev -printf '%h\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -k 1 -n
  • Check CPU cores and speed:
    cat /proc/cpuinfo
  • Check top resources usage process:
    top
  • List top 10 RAM/CPU usage processes:
    ps axo size,pcpu,command,pid | sort -rn | head -n 10

    . Change the order of arguments of ps axo so that it can be sorted by the following sort command.

  • Check how old is your HDD:
    smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Power_On

    . Or if you are in HW RAID1, you can use

    smartctl -a -d cciss,0 /dev/sda | grep Power_On

    , or can use smartctl -a -c /dev/sg2. Of course you will need to have smartctl installed (in debian:

    apt-get install -y smartmontools

    or

    aptitude -t wheezy-backports install -y smartmontools

    if you need the last version.).

  • To check health of NVMe disk, install nvme-cli package and run
    # nvme list
# nvme smart-log /dev/nvme0
  • To check bad sectors in HDD:
    badblocks -o sdb.txt -vs /dev/sdb

    . Replace /dev/sdb with /dev/sda or other devices to check other HDD. Further test with smartctl can be found HERE.

  • To suppress all messages from the kernel (and its drivers) except panic messages from appearing on the console:
    dmesg -n 1

    Remember to put it to “/etc/rc.local” so that it will affect in each reboot.

    echo "dmesg -n 1" >> /etc/rc.local
echo "" >> /etc/rc.local
  • To remount “/tmp/” and prevent it from executing files (malware):
    mount -o bind,noexec /tmp /tmp
umount /tmp
mount -o bind /tmp /tmp
mount -o remount,noexec /tmp
rm -fr /tmp/*
rm -fr /var/tmp/*
  • To find a full path of a specific process:
    file /proc/PROCESS_ID/exe
  • To remove all history command lines:
    cat /dev/null > ~/.bash_history && history -c && exit
  • If a partition is not mounted with full capacity of the whole disk, we can easily extend it with
    resize2fs /dev/sda
  • To watch number of active connections of apache processes (w/ available memory): 
    watch -n 1 "echo -n 'Apache Processes: ' && ps -C httpd --no-headers | wc -l && free -m"

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