Iometer is an I/O

subsystem A system is a group of interacting or interrelated elements that act according to a set of rules to form a unified whole. A system, surrounded and influenced by its environment, is described by its boundaries, structure and purpose and express ...

measurement and characterization

tool A tool is an object that can extend an individual's ability to modify features of the surrounding environment or help them accomplish a particular task. Although many animals use simple tools, only human beings, whose use of stone tools dates ba ...

for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and

troubleshooting Troubleshooting is a form of problem solving, often applied to repair failed products or processes on a machine or a system. It is a logical, systematic search for the source of a problem in order to solve it, and make the product or process ope ...

tool and is easily configured to replicate the behaviour of many popular

applications Application may refer to: Mathematics and computing * Application software, computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks ** Application layer, an abstraction layer that specifies protocols and interface methods used in a c ...

. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is

IOPS Input/output operations per second (IOPS, pronounced ''eye-ops'') is an input/output performance measurement used to characterize computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN). ...

History

Created by

Intel Corporation Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California. It is the world's largest semiconductor chip manufacturer by revenue, and is one of the developers of the x86 series ...

How To Test Server Performance Using IOmeter
/ref> (Sean Hefty, David Levine and Fab Tillier are listed by the Iometer

About dialog The dialog box (also called dialogue box (non-U.S. English), message box or simply dialog) is a graphical control element in the form of a small window that communicates information to the user and prompts them for a response. Dialog boxes are ...

as the developers), the tool was officially announced at the

Intel Developer Forum The Intel Developer Forum (IDF) was a biannual gathering of technologists to discuss Intel products and products based on Intel products. The first IDF was held in 1997. To emphasize the importance of China, the Spring 2007 IDF was held in Beij ...

(IDF) on 17 February 1998. In 2001 Intel discontinued development and subsequently handed the sources to the Open Source Development Lab for release under the Intel Open Source License. On 15 November 2001 the Iometer project was registered at

SourceForge.net SourceForge is a web service that offers software consumers a centralized online location to control and manage open-source software projects and research business software. It provides source code repository hosting, bug tracking, Mirror site ...

and an initial version was made available. Experiencing no further development, the project was relaunched by Daniel Scheibli in February 2003. Since then it has been driven by an international group of individuals who have been improving and

porting In software engineering, porting is the process of adapting software for the purpose of achieving some form of execution in a computing environment that is different from the one that a given program (meant for such execution) was originally des ...

the product to additional platforms.

Functionality

Iometer is based on a

client–server model The client–server model is a distributed application structure that partitions tasks or workloads between the providers of a resource or service, called servers, and service requesters, called clients. Often clients and servers communicate ov ...

, where one instance of the Iometer

graphical user interface The GUI ( "UI" by itself is still usually pronounced . or ), graphical user interface, is a form of user interface that allows User (computing), users to Human–computer interaction, interact with electronic devices through graphical icon (comp ...

is managing one or more 'managers' (each one representing a separate Dynamo.exe

process A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic. Things called a process include: Business and management *Business process, activities that produce a specific se ...

) which are doing the I/O with one or more worker threads. Iometer performs

Asynchronous I/O In computer science, asynchronous I/O (also non-sequential I/O) is a form of input/output processing that permits other processing to continue before the transmission has finished. A name used for asynchronous I/O in the Windows API is overlap ...

- accessing

files File or filing may refer to: Mechanical tools and processes * File (tool), a tool used to ''remove'' fine amounts of material from a workpiece **Filing (metalworking), a material removal process in manufacturing ** Nail file, a tool used to gent ...

block devices In Unix-like operating systems, a device file or special file is an interface to a device driver that appears in a file system as if it were an ordinary file. There are also special files in DOS, OS/2, and Windows. These special files al ...

(later one allowing to bypass the file system buffers). Iometer allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the 'Maximum Disk Size', 'Starting

Disk Sector In computer disk storage, a sector is a subdivision of a track on a magnetic disk or optical disc. Each sector stores a fixed amount of user-accessible data, traditionally 512 bytes for hard disk drives (HDDs) and 2048 bytes for CD-ROMs and ...

' and '# of Outstanding I/Os'. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the 'Access Specifications' configure the I/O types to the file. Configurable items within the Access Specifications are: * Transfer Request Size * Percent Random/Sequential distribution. * Percent Read/Write Distribution * Aligned I/O's. * Reply Size * TCP/IP status * Burstiness. In conjunction with the Access Specifications, Iometer allows the specifications to be cycled with incrementing outstanding I/O's, either

exponentially Exponential may refer to any of several mathematical topics related to exponentiation, including: *Exponential function, also: **Matrix exponential, the matrix analogue to the above *Exponential decay, decrease at a rate proportional to value * Exp ...

or linearly. The tool outputs 50 parameters into a .CSV file, allowing multiple applications to analyse and generate graphs and reports on the measured performance.

References

External links

Iometer Project homepage

Iometer Project on SourceForge.net
{{Intel software Input/output Benchmarks (computing)

History

Functionality

See also

References

External links