Bonnie++ vs dperf
Bonnie++
github.comdperf
github.comSide by side
| Figure | Bonnie++ | dperf |
|---|---|---|
| Price from | Free | Free |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| Free trial | — | — |
| Open source | — | — |
| Linux | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosted | Yes | Yes |
| Plans published | 1 | 1 |
| Spec score · Disk Benchmark Software | 8.4 (#3) | 7.7 (#13) |
| Spec score · PC Benchmark Software | 8.4 (#10) | 7.9 (#31) |
| Spec score · PC benchmark tools | 7.9 (#36) | 7.4 (#58) |
| Direct I/O | The -D option enables direct I/O for bulk I/O tests. | It uses O_DIRECT to bypass the operating system page cache for drive performance measurements. |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| License | The project documentation states that Bonnie++ is licensed under GPL version 2.0. | The project is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0. |
| Purpose | Bonnie++ benchmarks hard drives and file systems by measuring work per second and CPU usage. | dperf is a drive benchmarking utility for identifying storage bottlenecks and performance outliers across multiple drives. |
Plans
In their own words
Bonnie++
Bonnie++ is a free, command-line benchmark suite for measuring filesystem and disk I/O performance on Linux. It exercises sequential input and output, rewrites, random seeks, and file operations including creation, stat, and deletion of many small files. The project describes these workloads as useful for investigating I/O bottlenecks in I/O-intensive applications, including database work, and for simulating file activity associated with Squid or INN. Bonnie++ can test more than 2 GB of storage on a 32-bit machine. Its -D option enables direct I/O for bulk tests, while -b calls fsync after each write and syncs the directory after file creation or deletion. Semaphore support can synchronize multiple instances. Results can be emitted as plain text or CSV, with companion tools to convert CSV into HTML or formatted plain text. The project is licensed under GPL version 2.0, and the repository includes source code and Debian, RPM, and Sun-related packaging files. Its documentation warns against running the benchmark on live production machines because it can affect services and consume disk space or inodes.
dperf
dperf is a Linux command-line utility for benchmarking drives to identify storage bottlenecks and performance outliers. It runs tests on multiple drives simultaneously and ranks them by throughput. Measurements use O_DIRECT to bypass the operating system page cache. Users can configure block size, file size, and concurrent I/O operations per drive. Results report read and write throughput, with verbose mode adding per-drive statistics alongside aggregate totals. The tool supports sequential tests, but not random I/O tests, IOPS measurement, or latency measurement. Its README describes deployment as Kubernetes Jobs, CronJobs, or DaemonSets for storage validation, as well as automated checks in CI/CD pipelines. Temporary space requirements are based on file size multiplied by I/O operations per drive for each drive. dperf requires Linux, a kernel and filesystem supporting direct I/O, and write access to target directories. Prebuilt binaries are listed for amd64, arm64, ppc64le, and s390x. It is free under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0.