How can I test hd performance on an OpenVZ container?

Question

CentOS 5.x | VPS | OpenVZ

I'm trying out a vps that uses OpenVZ and am not sure what command to type to measure disk read performance. I thought hdparm would work but I get the following:

[root@echo dev]# hdparm -t /dev/simfs
/dev/simfs: Permission denied

Yet I don't see any other file systems to check...

[root@echo dev]# mount
/dev/simfs on / type reiserfs (rw,usrquota,grpquota)
/proc on /proc type proc (rw)
/sys on /sys type sysfs (rw)
none on /dev type tmpfs (rw)
none on /dev/pts type devpts (rw)
none on /proc/sys/fs/binfmt_misc type binfmt_misc (rw)

Anything else I can try?

-M

Answer 1

good old bonnie++; not most flashy benchmarking tool but one that gives useful results [ random and sequential reads/writes, i/o per sec ].

Answer 2

You could try to work around directly calling on /dev/simfs with a timed dd command:

time (dd if=/dev/zero of=/tmp/test bs=64k count=16k > /dev/null; sync)

Probably not as accurate as a true benchmark, though. Just a workaround. Example output:

16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 6.13276 seconds, 175 MB/s

real    0m6.786s
user    0m0.010s
sys     0m1.680s

Make sure to delete /tmp/test afterwards.