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Are benchmarks appropriate to measure or troubleshoot performance?

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Category:
ontap-9
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perf
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Applies to

ONTAP 9

Answer

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

 

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