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balena-io / etcher

Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily.
https://etcher.io/
Apache License 2.0
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Benchmarking Etcher #2851

Open lurch opened 5 years ago

lurch commented 5 years ago

I recently bought myself a 250GB Samsung T5 USB3 SSD which is very fast, so before I start using it for other purposes I thought I'd do a quick bit of benchmarking in Etcher :wink: :nerd_face:

My desktop PC has a Core i7-5820K CPU and 32GB of RAM, running the OS from an SSD, and I'm using the motherboard's USB3 ports, so there shouldn't be any OS/hardware limiting factors.

If I try to write a compressed image i.e. 2019-06-20-raspbian-buster-full.zip to the drive, Etcher writes to the drive at a pretty decent 60 MB/s, and watching the CPU monitor in the background, none of the CPUs go above 40% usage.

If I uncompress the image first i.e. to 2019-06-20-raspbian-buster-full.img then Etcher writes to the drive at a much more impressive 150 MB/s! I was surprised at just how much quicker it was with the image uncompressed first, given that none of the CPUs appear to be the throttling factor.

However even that speed seems "slow" when compared to the dd command - sudo dd if=~/Downloads/2019-06-20-raspbian-buster-full.img bs=4M of=/dev/sdc conv=fdatasync writes to the drive at 340 MB/s. I wasn't expecting the GUI of Etcher to add so much overhead compared to the command-line of dd :confused:

I repeated each of the above tests 3 times to ensure I was seeing reliable figures and not statistical flukes.

Strictly speaking this isn't a "problem" so feel free to close this issue, but I thought you might find the figures interesting. Especially given the "Insane Speeds" you're aiming for with https://www.balena.io/etcher/pro :racing_car:

EDIT: For reference, time unzip -t ~/Downloads/2019-06-20-raspbian-buster-full.zip uses 100% of one of the CPUs, and reports:

Archive:  /home/qpc/Downloads/2019-06-20-raspbian-buster-full.zip
    testing: 2019-06-20-raspbian-buster-full.img   OK
No errors detected in compressed data of /home/qpc/Downloads/2019-06-20-raspbian-buster-full.zip.

real    0m31.268s
user    0m30.996s
sys 0m0.268s
brianread108 commented 5 years ago

I am running Fedora 30 on a 16gb AMD Ryzen system and since upgrading etcher I am see very slow access to the SSD. I am getting less that 1Mb/s writing or validating. The Previous version (on Fedora 29) wrote a great deal faster (I never worried about the speed!).

lurch commented 5 years ago

@brianread108 Maybe it's worth timing some dd writes to the SSD as well, to check that it's new Etcher to blame and not new Fedora?

brianread108 commented 5 years ago

mm, just run a dd which took 1.5 hours - under 1Mb/s. I need to think about fedora 30 rather thna etcher I guess.