------------
Introduction
------------

This is the IOZone benchmark, compiled for BeOS DR8 and above.
It's a simple benchmark for measuring sequential I/O performance, that
tests your hard drive, controller, and filesystem for speed.  I hope it
will be useful to the engineers at Be who are busy redesigning the filesystem
for DR9!

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Contents
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I've included two binaries, "iozone", and "iozone_mod".  iozone is the
original C-based source code that uses the POSIX read() and write() calls, 
and iozone_mod is a version I modified to use BeOS's BFile and BDirectory 
classes.  The source code is included, in iozone.c, and iozone_mod.cpp
respectively.  Here are the commands I used to compile the binaries:

$ mwcc -O7 -o iozone iozone.c
$ mwcc -O7 -o iozone_mod iozone_mod.cpp

You might expect the modified C++ version to be faster (because it uses the
"native" Be API), but I was unable to measure a difference in speed between
the two versions!  This means that if you're porting a POSIX program to Be,
there's probably no reason to spend time modifying it to use BFile.

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Results
-------

For your curiosity, here is the performance of my system, a Dual-66 MHz
BeBox with 32MB RAM and a 1GB Quantum SCSI hard drive.  The first parameter 
to iozone is the size of the file to create (in megabytes), and the second 
parameter is the block size (in bytes).  As you can see, BeOS performs much 
better when reading and writing in large (64k) chunks than with a small block
size like the default 512 bytes.

Command			Read (bytes/sec)  Write (bytes/sec)
-------			----------------  -----------------
iozone 32 512		773910		  909728
iozone 32 1024		950281		  1102494
iozone 32 4096		1254324		  1522502
iozone 32 16384		2834467		  2718058
iozone 32 65536		3215874		  3446428

And here are the results when I ran IOZone on my other system, a 486DX4/100
PC with 36MB RAM and a 1GB Quantum SCSI drive connected to an Adaptec VLB 
SCSI card running FreeBSD:

Command			Read (bytes/sec)  Write (bytes/sec)
-------			----------------  -----------------
iozone 32 512		3039608		  1808407
iozone 32 1024		3558382		  2450066
iozone 32 4096		4157761		  3904515
iozone 32 16384		4378152		  4414149
iozone 32 65536		4554578		  4530556

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Conclusions
-----------

This is a very simple, yet straightforward benchmark.  It clearly shows
that Be's I/O performance is acceptable at the higher block sizes, but could
certainly stand to be improved, as comparison with my 486 indicates.  This
will be a good test to run on DR9 when it is released!

Jake Hamby (jehamby@lightside.com)