Fio (POSIX) Benchmark

Fio Tests Overview

Fio (Flexible I/O Tester) is an open source powerful tool used for benchmarking and testing the performance of storage systems. It supports a variety of I/O operations, including sequential and random reads/writes, and allows for highly customizable workloads. Fio is cross-platform, working on Linux, Windows, and macOS, and provides detailed performance metrics like IOPS, bandwidth, and latency.

This page demonstrate the fio testing results of Alluxio. The test cases can be applied to other storage systems.

Test details

Test environments

All instances are on the same availability zone in AWS.

Alluxio Worker

• 1 i3en.metal instance

• Raid 0 of 8 nvme SSDs (created by mdadm command)

• 100Gbps network bandwidth

• Ubuntu 24.04

• An Alluxio worker process

• A single ETCD node

Alluxio Client

• 1 c5n.metal instance

• 100Gbps network bandwidth

• Ubuntu 24.04

• Fuse 3.16.2

• An Alluxio FUSE process

Single Worker & Client Test

This scenario tests the read performance against a single 100GB large file. Only 1 client and 1 worker are involved in the test.

Test preparation

Place a single 100GB file in the UFS. In this benchmark, we use an S3 bucket in the same region with the workers & clients.

Sequential read

Run the following commands on the Alluxio client:

fio -iodepth=1 -rw=read -ioengine=libaio -bs=<block_size> -numjobs=<numjobs> -group_reporting -size=100G -filename=/mnt/alluxio/100gb -name=read_test --readonly -direct=1 --runtime=60

The numjobs param specifies the concurrent fio jobs that performs read. In this benchmark, numjobs is set to 1, 32, or 128. The bs param specifies the block size used in the test. We use 256k for throughput testing and 4k for testing IOPS.

Random read

Same as the hot sequential read, but the rw param is changed to randread.

fio -iodepth=1 -rw=randread -ioengine=libaio -bs=<block_size> -numjobs=<numjobs> -group_reporting -size=100G -filename=/mnt/alluxio/100gb -name=read_test --readonly -direct=1 --runtime=60

Results summary

Single Worker & Client Throughput (256k block size)

Bandwidth/Threads	Single Thread	32 Threads
Sequential Read	2081MiB/s	8183MiB/s
Random Read	141MiB/s	7504MiB/s

Single Worker & Client IOPS (4k block size)

IOPS/Threads	Single Thread	32 Threads	128 Threads
Sequential Read	55.9k	244k	179k
Random Read	1.6k	70.1k	162k

• Performance for cached data

Appendix - Alluxio Configurations

Cluster configuration (alluxio-site.properties)

alluxio.master.hostname=localhost
alluxio.master.journal.type=NOOP
alluxio.security.authorization.permission.enabled=false
alluxio.worker.membership.manager.type=ETCD
alluxio.mount.table.source=ETCD
alluxio.etcd.endpoints=<endpoints>
alluxio.client.list.status.from.ufs.enabled=false
alluxio.worker.page.store.sizes=2TB
alluxio.worker.page.store.page.size=4M
alluxio.worker.page.store.dirs=/data1/worker
alluxio.user.metadata.cache.max.size=2000000
alluxio.dora.client.ufs.fallback.enabled=false
alluxio.user.position.reader.streaming.async.prefetch.thread=256

JVM options (alluxio-env.sh)

ALLUXIO_WORKER_JAVA_OPTS="$ALLUXIO_WORKER_JAVA_OPTS -Xmx24G -Xmx24G -XX:+UseG1GC"
ALLUXIO_FUSE_JAVA_OPTS="$ALLUXIO_FUSE_JAVA_OPTS -Xms48G -Xmx48G -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=24g  -XX:+UseG1GC"

Fuse mount options

-max_background=256 -max_idle_threads=256 -entry_timeout=60 -attr_timeout=60