Filebench: A Flexible Framework for File System Benchmarking

File system benchmarks constitute a crucial part of a storage evaluator’s toolbox. Due to the wide variety of modern workloads and ever-growing list of storage stack features, modern benchmarks have become fairly complex tools. This article describes Filebench, one of the most popular modern file system benchmark tool suites. Using several practical examples, we demonstrate Filebench’s versatility, expressiveness, and ease of use. It is our hope that this article will encourage people to use Filebench to describe their real-life workloads as well as publicly contribute new workloads.