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Linux: flush buffers and cache for testing
Linux caches disk reads and buffers writes to improve filesystem performance, but that can play havoc with results when doing disk I/O benchmarking.
For example, search all of /var for text that likely won’t be found:
[brian@penguin ~]$ time sudo grep -r qazwsxedc /var real 0m16.577s user 0m0.425s sys 0m0.463s
Now run the command a second time:
[brian@penguin ~]$ time sudo grep -r qazwsxedc /var real 0m0.493s user 0m0.404s sys 0m0.086s
Half a second vs 16.5 seconds. The reason for the wild difference between the
two time is on the first run the computer had to read the data from the disk.
But as it did so, Linux put the data into its cache, which is in memory. So the
second time the command ran, practically all of /var was in RAM, so it took
a lot less time to scan the data.
Doing benchmarks when disk I/O is involved requires flushing the caches between tests. You can do that with the following command:
free && sync && sudo sh -c 'echo 3 >/proc/sys/vm/drop_caches' && echo && free