Simon Krenger

The Linux kernel provides the tmpfs, which basically creates a file system in memory. This temporary file system can be used to store temporary data, such as caches or log files. Read more about tmpfs in the kernel documentation: tmpfs.txt

After reading this excellent article about using tmpfs in Linux, I decided to put it to the test. Even though the Linux kernel already does a good job caching files, I wanted to see the performance of this solution by applying different loads on it. For this, I am using the IOzone tool I already used for my ZFS tests (1) (2) and my Amazon EC2 IO test.

As I am currently fiddling around with Oracle Solaris and the related technologies, I wanted to see how the ZFS file system compares to a hardware RAID Controller. The ZFS file system allows you to configure different RAID levels such as RAID 0, 1, 10, 5, 6. In this post, I want to test the RAID 10 performance of ZFS against the performance with the HP RAID Controller (also in a RAID 10 configuration) over 4 disks.