Increasing EBS Performance

To get optimal performance from a Provisioned IOPS volume, we recommend that you use an EBS-Optimized instance. EBS-Optimized instances deliver dedicated throughput between Amazon EC2 and Amazon EBS, with options between 500 and 2000 Mbps, depending on the instance type.

To create an EBS-Optimized instance, select Launch as an EBS-Optimized instance when launching the instance using the EC2 console, or specify --ebs-optimized when using the command line. Be sure that you launch one of the instance types that supports this option. For the example tests in this topic, we recommend that you launch an m1.xlarge instance. For more information, see EBS-Optimized Instances.

To create a Provisioned IOPS volume, select Provisioned IOPS (io1) when creating the volume using the EC2 console, or specify --type io1 --iopsiops when using the command line. For information about attaching these volumes to your instance, see Attaching a Volume to an Instance.

For the example tests, we recommend that you create a RAID array with 6 volumes, which offers a high level of performance. Because you are charged by the GB used and the number of provisioned IOPS, not the number of volumes, there is no additional cost for creating multiple, smaller volumes and using them to create a stripe set. If you're using Oracle ORION to benchmark your volumes, it can simulate striping the same way that Oracle ASM does, so we recommend that you let ORION do the striping. If you are using a different benchmarking tool, you'll need to stripe the volumes yourself.

For information about creating a striped volume on Windows, see Create a Striped Volume in Windows.

To create a six-volume stripe set on Linux, use a command like the following.

$ sudo mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=0 --chunk=64 --raid-devices=6 /dev/sdf /dev/sdg /dev/sdh /dev/sdi /dev/sdj /dev/sdk

For this example, the file system we use is XFS. You should use the file system that meets your requirements. On Amazon Linux, use the following command to install the XFS file system.

$ sudo yum install -y xfsprogs

Then, use the following commands to create and mount the XFS file system.

$ sudo mkdir -p /media/p_iops_vol0 && sudo mkfs.xfs /dev/md0 && 
sudo mount -t xfs /dev/md0 /media/p_iops_vol0 && sudo chown ec2-user:ec2-user /media/p_iops_vol0/

Finally, to get the most accurate results while running these tests, you must pre-warm the volume. For a completely new volume that was created from scratch, you should write to all blocks before using the volume. For a new volume created from a snapshot, you should read all the blocks that have data before using the volume. For example, on Linux you can read each block on the volume using the following command.

$ dd if=/dev/md0 of=/dev/null

On Windows, a full format of the volume pre-warms it. Use the format <drive letter> /p:1 command to write zeros to the entire disk.

The following are among the possible tools you can install and use to benchmark the performance of a Provisioned IOPS volume.

These benchmarking tools support a wide variety of test parameters. You should use commands that approximate the workloads your volumes will support. These commands are intended as examples to help you get started.

Run the following commands on an EBS-Optimized instance with attached Provisioned IOPS volumes that have been pre-warmed.

When you are finished testing your volumes, see these topics for help cleaning up: Deleting an Amazon EBS Volume and Terminating Instances.

fio Commands

Run fio on the stripe set that you created.

By default, fio is installed in /usr/local/bin, which isn't in root's path. You should update your path, or use chmod to enable fio to be run as ec2-user.

The following command performs 16 KB random write operations.

fio --directory=/media/p_iops_vol0 
--name fio_test_file --direct=1 --rw=randwrite --bs=16k --size=1G 
--numjobs=16 --time_based --runtime=180 --group_reporting 

The following command performs 16 KB random read operations.

fio --directory=/media/p_iops_vol0 
--name fio_test_file --direct=1 --rw=randread --bs=16k --size=1G 
--numjobs=16 --time_based --runtime=180 --group_reporting 

For more information about interpreting the results, go to this Linux tutorial: Inspecting disk IO performance with fio.

Oracle ORION Commands

Run ORION on the Provisioned IOPS volumes, having it simulate Oracle ASM striping instead of providing it with a stripe set that uses Windows striping.

In the directory where you installed ORION, create a file, piops_test.lun, to specify the volumes for your stripe set. The following example file specifies six Provisioned IOPS volumes to be striped.

\\.\D:
\\.\E:
\\.\F:
\\.\G:
\\.\H:
\\.\I:

The following command performs 16 KB random I/O operations (80 percent reads and 20 percent writes), simulating 64 KB RAID-0 stripes.

orion -run advanced -testname piops_test -size_small 16 -size_large 16 
-type rand -simulate raid0 -stripe 64 -write 80 -matrix detailed -num_disks 6

After the command is finished, ORION generates output files with the results in the same directory. For more information about ORION, see its User Guide.

SQLIO Commands

Run SQLIO on the stripe set that you created.

Create a file, param.txt, to specify your striped set. The contents of this file should look something like this (here, d:\ corresponds to the striped set, and the test uses 6 threads and a 10 GB file).

d:\bigtestfile.dat 6 0x0 10240

The following command performs 16 KB random data writes.

sqlio -kW -s600 -frandom -t8 -o8 -b16 -LS -BH -Fparam.txt

The following command performs 16 KB random data reads.

sqlio -kR -s600 -frandom -t8 -o8 -b16 -LS -BH -Fparam.txt

The results are displayed in the Command Prompt window. For more information about SQLIO, see the readme.txt file in your SQLIO installation directory.