We have run benchmarks to measure filesystem performances. Benchmarks have been made on a middle-end PC, based on a i486DX2 processor, using 16 MB of memory and two 420 MB IDE disks. The tests were run on Ext2 fs and Xia fs (Linux 1.1.62) and on the BSD Fast filesystem in asynchronous and synchronous mode (FreeBSD 2.0 Alpha -- based on the 4.4BSD Lite distribution).
We have run two different benchmarks. The Bonnie benchmark tests I/O speed on a big file -- the file size was set to 60 MB during the tests. It writes data to the file using character based I/O, rewrites the contents of the whole file, writes data using block based I/O, reads the file using character I/O and block I/O, and seeks into the file. The Andrew Benchmark was developed at Carneggie Mellon University and has been used at the University of Berkeley to benchmark BSD FFS and LFS. It runs in five phases: it creates a directory hierarchy, makes a copy of the data, recursively examine the status of every file, examine every byte of every file, and compile several of the files.