Simulating Load on a File-System

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Sometimes you want an easy way to simulate load on a file-system that you are trying to test. Here’s a quick and easy way.

Suppose your mount point you want to perform this IO is “/myspecialmount”. (Assuming you have plenty of space to test)

Then the easiest way to load some IO is through the following bash-script:

[sourcecode language=“bash”] #!/bin/bash

while true do echo “=== Starting clean-up ====” rm -fr /myspecialmount/usr echo “=== Starting load ====” rsync -avp /usr /myspecialmount done [/sourcecode]

In the above code sample, Line-6 - cleans up the filesystem sub-folder “/myspecialmount/usr”. The options “-fr” allows you to perform the clean-up recursively with a force option. And in Line-8, we synchronize the systems “/usr” folder and files onto “/myspecialmount/usr”. And these two steps are done on an infinite-loop.

Please note that this is not a true load-testing where you have parallel-simultaneous IO requests being sent to a filesystem but rather a simple way to create some load.

There are some specialized tools such as “ iozone ”, “ bonnie ” and “ dbench ” and others (see Filesystems section) that are sophisticated bench-marking tools available to the Linux community.

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