Benchmarking

This page documents performance benchmarks for the Seadogger Homelab infrastructure.

Credit and Thanks: Benchmarking methodology and tools from Jeff Geerling

Storage Performance Benchmarks

NVMe vs SD Card Performance

Key Findings:

• NVMe SSDs provide dramatically better I/O performance than SD cards
• Sequential read/write speeds exceed SD card performance by 10-20x
• Random I/O performance critical for Kubernetes workloads

Detailed Comparison

Reference: SDCard Vs. NVMe IO Performance Discussion

Storage Configuration

Worker Node Partition Layout

Worker nodes use:

• Full 4TB NVMe for Rook-Ceph OSD storage
• No OS partitions on NVMe (boot from SD card initially)
• Dedicated storage for distributed Ceph cluster

Control Plane Partition Layout

Control plane uses:

• 500GB NVMe for OS and system storage
• Smaller capacity sufficient for control plane workload
• etcd snapshots stored on NVMe for fast backup/restore

Performance Metrics

I/O Performance Summary

Test Conditions:

• Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB RAM)
• NVMe SSD via PCIe HAT
• Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm)
• K3s v1.32.6+k3s1

Tools Used:

• fio (Flexible I/O tester)
• iozone
• dd benchmarks

Running Your Own Benchmarks

See the benchmarks/ directory in the repository for:

• Benchmark scripts
• Test configurations
• Result analysis tools
• Detailed methodology

Quick benchmark:

# Navigate to benchmarks directory
cd benchmarks/

# Run storage benchmark
./run-storage-benchmark.sh

# Results saved to results/

See Also

• 03-Hardware-and-Network - Hardware specifications and configuration
• 06-Storage-Rook-Ceph - Storage architecture and Rook-Ceph deployment
• Jeff Geerling's Raspberry Pi Benchmarks