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MST-Bench(1)		     General Commands Manual		    MST-Bench(1)

NAME
     MST-Bench - Maximum Sustainable Throughput Benchmark

SYNOPSIS
     mst-bench [--help] [--trials N] [--file-size GiB]

OPTIONS
     --help
	    Print a basic help message

     --trials N
	    Run N trials and report the average.  The default is 3.

     --file-size GiB
	    Use  a file of GiB gibibytes for the disk tests.  The default is 2 *
	    physical memory size, which is generally enough  to  overwhelm  disk
	    buffering  and produce a reasonable estimate of sustainable through-
	    put.  However, systems with low physical  memory  may  benefit  from
	    large  disk cache on the controller which may result in an overesti-
	    mate of disk speed.  In those cases, specifying a larger file system
	    may produce more realistic results.

PURPOSE
     MST-Bench is a simple program for reporting the maximum sustainable  memory
     and  disk throughput one could expect from an optimal program.  It does not
     attempt to report hardware transfer rate (which is not generally useful) or
     estimate performance of real programs.

     The goal is to provide a theoretical maximum to which real programs can  be
     compared.	 For  example,	if  MST-Bench reports 10 seconds to sequentially
     read the generated file, then we know that 10 seconds  is	the  theoretical
     best time that any program can achieve while streaming this file.	If fgrep
     string  bench.tmpfile  takes  15 seconds, then it is achieving about 2/3 of
     the maximum theoretical disk throughput.  We might then investigate whether
     fgrep's CPU bottleneck can be reduced to the point where  it  can	keep  up
     with  the	disk  input.  Once fgrep is running clone to 10 seconds for this
     file, we know that it cannot be sped up much further.

DESCRIPTION
     MST-Bench estimates maximum sustainable throughput for memory and disk  un-
     der typical circumstances.

     It runs the following speed tests:

     Sequential  memory  access  for  a small array that should result in a high
     cache hit ratio, where most accesses are satisfied by the cache.

     Sequential memory access for a large array that  should  result  in  a  low
     cache hit ratio, where many accesses are not satisfied by the cache.

     Sequential  disk  write of a file much larger than physical memory, so that
     disk buffering has a minimal impact and the reported throughput  represents
     sustainable speed for the disk hardware.

     Sequential  disk  read  of a file much larger than physical memory, so that
     disk buffering has a minimal impact and the reported throughput  represents
     sustainable speed for the disk hardware.

     Sequential disk rewrite of a file much larger than physical memory, so that
     disk  buffering has a minimal impact and the reported throughput represents
     sustainable speed for the disk hardware.  In many file systems, overwriting
     shows different performance characteristics than new writes.

     Random disk read of a file much larger than physical memory, so  that  disk
     buffering	has a minimal impact and the reported throughput represents sus-
     tainable speed for the disk hardware.  The random read reads the same  file
     as the sequential read, reading every block in the file exactly once but in
     random  order.   This  provides some idea about the latency of disk access.
     Note that dividing the file into more random reads of smaller  blocks  will
     result in lower performance.

FILES
     bench.tmpfile - file generated in current directory for disk speed test

BUGS
     Please  report  bugs to the author and send patches in unified diff format.
     (man diff for more information)

AUTHOR
     J. Bacon

								    MST-Bench(1)

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