We ran our own benchmarks with a few specific tweaks to show you the real difference.
Benchmarks
To benchmark our disk, we used thePhoronix Test Suite.
Prominent Tweaks
There are quite a few changes that people recommend when upgrading to an SSD.
Enabling TRIM
you’ve got the option to enable TRIM to help manage disk performance over the long-term.
Tmpfs
The system cache is stored in /tmp.
Switching IO Schedulers
Your system doesn’t write all changes to disk immediately, and multiple requests get queued.
You should see a few different options.
If not, you should be able to use noop without problems.
Look over everything to ensure it looks good.
Then, hit CTRL+O to save, then CTRL+X to quit.
Restart
In order for all these changes to go into effect, you gotta restart.
After that, you should be all set.
it’s possible for you to even use aLiveCD or LiveUSB to recoverif you want.
Benchmarking Results
To perform the benchmarks, we ran the disk suite of tests.
You’ll see a brief explanation of what the test measures as well as an interpretation of the results.
Large File Operations
This test compresses a 2GB file with random data and writes it to disk.
The SSD tweaks here show in a roughly 40% improvement.
IOzone simulates file system performance, in this case by writing an 8GB file.
Again, an almost 50% increase.
Here, an 8GB file is read.
The results are almost the same as without adjusting ext4.
AIO-Stress asynchronously tests input and output, using a 2GB test file and a 64KB record size.
Here, there’s almost a 200% increase in performance compared to vanilla ext4!
Small File Operations
An SQLite database is created and PTS adds 12,500 records to it.
The SSD tweaks here actually slowed down performance by about 10%.
The Apache Benchmark tests random reads of small files.
There was about a 25% performance gain after optimizing our SSD.
This simulates web and mail servers pretty well, and we see a 16% performance increase after tweaking.
Our tweaks see an increase, again, with smaller file sizes.
About a 45% increase with ext4 adjustments.
you’re free to see that as the number of clients goes up, the performance discrepancy increases.
With 128 clients, the performance is almost the same.
This test depends on the kernel’s AIO access library.
we’ve got a 20% improvement here.
While writing 64MB of data with 32 threads, we still have a 75% increase in performance.
This benchmarks simply measures how long it takes to extract the Linux kernel.
Not too much of an increase in performance here.
Summary
The adjustments we made to Ubuntu’s out-of-the-box ext4 configuration did have quite an impact.
Keep in mind that this was specifically with Ubuntu Natty 64-bit.
If your system or SSD is different, your mileage may vary.
