Copyright: Copyright © 1996 Adaptec, Inc.
Citation: This Help file is copyrighted 1996 by Adaptec, Inc.


Overview

Adaptec’s ThreadMark™ benchmark measures multithreaded I/O performance on computers running Microsoft® Windows NT™ or Windows® 95. You can use ThreadMark to compare the performance of different disk drives and host adapters, in order to find the optimal I/O solution for your Windows desktop environment. Because ThreadMark uses the same Win32 API calls that other applications use, it makes unbiased performance measurements on any SCSI or EIDE disk drive or host adapter.

ThreadMark is convenient to use. Simply select the drive, or drives, to be measured and click the Start button. ThreadMark performs extensive measurements using single and multithreaded I/O requests. Upon completion, the results from each measurement are weighted and averaged to arrive at a single data transfer rate and a percent CPU utilization number. You can save these results or import them into a spreadsheet or word processor.

The written materials you received with the ThreadMark program include a complete description of ThreadMark’s test methodology and weighting scheme.


To run a test

1	Close all other Windows applications before running a ThreadMark I/O test. Test results will be inaccurate if other applications are running.

2	Select the drive or drives that you want to benchmark by clicking the check boxes next to the list of drive letters. You can select up to four drives.

3	Click the Start button to begin the test. The benchmark will run for approximately one hour. Results are displayed when the test completes.

Note

•	During the test the progress bar increments very slowly. This is done to avoid generating activity that would alter the CPU utilization results. To monitor activity at any given moment, listen for hard disk activity or check the drive indicator light, which is usually lit while the benchmark is running. There will be some pauses while calculations are performed, and the drive light may remain lit constantly while sequential files are read or written.

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To stop a test

To stop a test while it is in progress, click the Cancel button in the Progress window.

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To save results and detailed reports

ThreadMark automatically displays the benchmark results when the test is complete. To save the results in an ASCII-text file, click the Save summary results on exit check box in the Save Options section of the Results window. You can enter a title for the file in the Test Title field, and you can add comments in the Comments field. The comments and the information in the Additional Information window are saved with the test results. The summary results are saved in files with a .txt extension.

ThreadMark takes many measurements that are weighted and combined to calculate the data transfer rate and percent CPU utilization. To save a detailed listing of all the individual measurements in an ASCII-text file, click the Save detailed benchmark data on exit check box. The report file will be given the same name as the results file but will be given a .rpt extension.

Note

•	The results of individual tests are kept in memory while the benchmark is running to avoid interfering with the measurements. The data is dumped to disk when all the tests have completed.

Tip

•	Use the Test Title and Comments fields to uniquely identify individual passes when you run the benchmark multiple times. You can include additional system configuration information not detected by ThreadMark in the Comments field.

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To view results and detailed reports

Results are automatically displayed when the benchmark completes. To view previously saved results, click the View Results button or select View Results from the View menu. You can also view saved results in any word processor or text editor.

To view detailed reports

•	Click the View Results button and change the Files of type field to ThreadMark Reports (*.rpt). You can also view reports by selecting View Results from the View menu and changing the Files of type field to ThreadMark Reports (*.rpt). You can view saved benchmark results in any word processor or text editor.

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To interpret report files

Report files automatically generate the following information:

•	Date and Time - date and time when the benchmark was run.

•	Thread - identifies by number each I/O thread executed by the benchmark.

•	Source/Flags - identifies where each thread originates and identifies flags that were set for that thread. A Read thread originates from a file on disk; a Write thread originates from memory. An S in the flags section indicates that the file was accessed or written sequentially. This is a signal to the operating system to adjust its read-ahead or write cache buffers accordingly.

•	Destination/Flags - identifies where data from the I/O is read or written to. A Read thread reads data into memory; a Write thread writes data to a file on disk.

•	# Bytes - specifies the I/O request size for each thread, in bytes.

•	Time - specifies the number of seconds that the thread is active.

•	CPS - specifies the number of I/O calls per second.

•	MB/s - specifies the average data transfer rate, in MBytes per second, for each individual thread and for all threads combined.

•	Average CPU Usage during the test - indicates how much CPU overhead was needed to execute all the threads during the test.

  See Also


To change SCSI drive cache settings

1	Select Change Drive Cache on the Action menu. ThreadMark displays a list of SCSI drives installed in your computer.

2	Select a drive from the list by clicking on the drive name.

3	Look at the Read Caching and Write Caching check boxes. If a check appears in the box, the cache is enabled.

4	If desired, enable or disable caching by clicking the check boxes.

5	Click OK to enter the changes.

Note

•	The caching utility works only with SCSI drives. It does not work with EIDE drives.