IOMelt Provisioned IOPS EBS Benchmark Results - December 2012

This is a set of benchmark results for AWS Provisioned IOPS EBS in the US East Region (North Virginia).

Direct link to the results
Direct link to the Raw data and R script to generate charts
Please note that this R script is different from the one used for the August benchmark. It was modified in order to support the two new columns in the CSV output of IOMelt.

Introduction:

Since I have published the previous EBS benchmark some people have asked me to do the same tests using provisioned IOPS EBS volumes.

These tests were performed in the AWS US East Region (North Virginia) using a m1.large instance. The volume size was the minimum necessary in order to create 100, 1000 and 2000 provisioned IOPS EBS volumes. The volume size was always the minimum necessary in order to configure the desired IOPS capacity, volume size in Gigabytes has to be at least 1:10 of the configured IOPS.

The objective was to verify if the provisioned IOPS EBS volume would provide a more consistent IO throughput capacity during the test.

Environment

The instance was created using a standard AWS AMI (Amazon Linux AMI 2012.03) that was updated using yum. Besides installing a compiler (gcc) and the GNU make tool no other modifications were performed on the operating system and its configuration.

The root volumes were created using the standard web GUI and the instances were recreated for each test.

The filesystem used was ext4, as it is the default filesystem available in the standard AMI. This is the output of mount and dumpe2fs showing the mounted volumes and the filesystem block size used:

[ec2-user@large ~]$ sudo dumpe2fs /dev/xvda1  | egrep -i 'block size'
dumpe2fs 1.42 (29-Nov-2011)
Block size:               4096
[ec2-user@large ~]$ mount
/dev/xvda1 on / type ext4 (rw,noatime)
proc on /proc type proc (rw)
sysfs on /sys type sysfs (rw)
devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)
tmpfs on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)

IOMelt version 0.6 was compiled and the standard Linux cron was used to schedule it to run every 5 minutes:

[ec2-user@large ~]$ sudo crontab -l 
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/iomelt -dor >> /root/iomelt.out 2>&1

For a detailed description of the command line options please refer to the IOMelt man page or the README file.

Volume sizes:

Time Frame and other considerations

Tests were run from November 11th, 2012 through December 9th, 2012 in the North Virginia Region. The iomelt application was called 5,925 times during the tests in this region.

For each instance 7 charts were generated using R:

• Kernel Density for Serial Write Performance
• Kernel Density for Serial Read Performance
• Scatter Plot for Serial Read
• Scatter Plot for Serial Write
• Scatter Plot for Random Reread
• Scatter Plot for Random Rewrite
• Scatter Plot for Random Read&Write

Results

Averages, Maximum and Minimum Throughput (calls/s) for each volume:

For sake of simplicty I'll plot only the charts for 1,000 and 2,000 IOPS, raw data and R scripts are available if you need to plot the charts for the 100 IOPS data.

• Kernel Density for Serial Write Performance
• Kernel Density for Serial Read Performance
• Scatter Plot for Serial Read
• Scatter Plot for Serial Write
• Scatter Plot for Random Reread
• Scatter Plot for Random Rewrite
• Scatter Plot for Random Read&Write

Kernel Density
	1,000 iops	2,000 iops
Serial Write
Serial Read

Scatter Plots
	1,000 iops	2,000 iops
Serial Read
Serial Write
Random Reread
Random Rewrite
Random Read&Write

Conclusions: