How to measure disk performance on your Linux

Installing it will depend on each distribution, but in Debian or Ubuntu, or any of those that are based on these extended distributions (yes, we all know that Ubuntu is a fork of Debian) it is as easy as installing it with the apt-get command : sudo apt-get install Bonnie ++ (It is in the basic Ubuntu repositories so we don’t have to add extra repositories for this utility)

Once installed we can run it. Bonnie ++ It has the advantage that it controls so that the system cache does not affect the results and also performs latency tests and a good battery of read and write tests.

To execute it, it is enough to call the command with some conditions such as the destination folder, the system’s RAM size (depending on the RAM it will make the test files larger or smaller) and the user that we want in charge of the test. I have used root, but it can be any other. The thing would be like this: Bonnie –d / tmp –r 2048 – u root

The process will take depending on our system and the hardware that we have installed. We can cast the results to a web page (include the appropriate modules for this), or dump them to an output file, but the results are quite easy to read.

As you can see, my small server offers a writing speed of 111MB / s and a reading speed of 152MB / s. For those of you who like to monitor the load of a benchmark, you can open another console session with iotop which is a storage system input and output performance monitor for Linux. You can install it with: sudo apt-get install iotop