Are benchmarks appropriate to measure or troubleshoot performance?
Applies to
ONTAP 9Answer
Reasons why benchmarks may be appropriate
- Setting up a new system
- Doing Proof-of-Concept testing with the account team
Reasons why benchmarks may not be appropriate
- Benchmarks need tuning of parameters like concurrency to achieve optimal performance
- Benchmark may use a system with different performance parameters than the production workload
- Production workloads are very hard to exactly recreate and synthetic workload may not encounter the problem even if it is the same workload
- Benchmarks may not be representative of the operations the production workload will be once placed on the new system
- Synthetic benchmarks in a production system won't perform the same as a brand new system due to:
- File system age
- Fragmentation
- Organic growth of data takes slightly more processing for each operation and can be cumulative on performance
- Other workloads may be running where a new system may not have other workloads running
Additional Information
Benchmarks are slow on CrystalDiskMark especially 4k reads or other benchmarks