This article is outdated and may not work correctly for current operating systems or software.
In this tutorial, we'll be installing and running ioping to determine the hard drive latency on your server. The steps in this tutorial will work on both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of CentOS 6.
Make sure that tar is installed. We will use it to extract the ioping tarball file.
yum install tar
Create and navigate to the directory where ioping will be installed.
cd ~
mkdir ioping
cd ioping
Download the installation file using wget. We will be using version 0.6 from their Google Code repository. If you are looking for a newer version, visit their GitHub repository.
wget https://ioping.googlecode.com/files/ioping-0.6.tar.gz
Extract the tarball file.
tar -xzvf ioping-0.6.tar.gz
Enter the directory and compile ioping.
cd ioping-0.6
make ioping
Ioping has a list of built-in commands. Run ioping without any arguments to show the list.
ioping
To show sequential latency, enter the following command.
ioping -R /dev/sda
To determine the latency of the entire drive, run this command.
ioping -c 10 /
See the ioping documentation for more examples of measuring IO stats.