During infrastructure capacity planning and sizing, the technical designer has to calculate CPU, RAM, Storage, and Network resource requirements. Recently, I had an interesting discussion with my colleagues on how to estimate CPU requirements for application workload.
Each computer application requires some CPU resources for computational tasks and additional resources for I/O tasks. It is obvious that the computational tasks require CPU cycles, however, it is not so obvious that there are CPU cycles associated also with I/O. In other words, each I/O requires some CPU resources. It does not matter if it is memory, storage, or network I/O.
For example, a generally accepted rule of thumb in the networking is that
This would mean 2.5Gb/s would require ~ 2.5Ghz CPU, thus ~ 100% of one CPU Core @ 2.5 GHz.
It would be nice to have a similar rule of thumb for storage I/O. I did quick research (googling) but was not able to find any information about CPU requirements for storage I/O. I did a quick test in my home lab and start the synthetic random workload (4KB I/O) on 4vCPU VM on ESXi host having CPU at 2 GHz, where I was able to see 5,000 IOPS with CPU utilization 8.5%. This would mean one 4KB I/O requires 136 Hz.
I did another test with 512 B I/O where 1 IOPS requires 114 Hz.
And for 64KB I/O size, 1 IOPS requires 161 Hz.
0.5 KB I/O => 512 Bytes I/O (4,096 bits) = 114 Hz
4 KB I/O => 4,096 Bytes I/O (32,768 bits) = 136 Hz
64 KB I/O => 65,536 Bytes I/O (52,4288 bits) = 161 Hz
Based on my observations, it is difficult to define the rule of thumb for 1 Bit/s or Byte/s but rather I would define CPU (Hz) requirements for 1 storage I/O.
Based on multiple assessments of real datacenter environments, I would say that typical average storage I/O size is around 40-50 KB, therefore here is my rule of thumb
Please, be aware that this is a very simplified calculation but clearly shows that storage workload is always associated with CPU requirements and it can help with capacity planning and infrastructure sizing.
What do you think about this calculation?
Do you observe different numbers?
Would you calculate it differently?
You can leave the comment below the article.
Each computer application requires some CPU resources for computational tasks and additional resources for I/O tasks. It is obvious that the computational tasks require CPU cycles, however, it is not so obvious that there are CPU cycles associated also with I/O. In other words, each I/O requires some CPU resources. It does not matter if it is memory, storage, or network I/O.
For example, a generally accepted rule of thumb in the networking is that
1 Hertz of CPU processing is required to send or receive 1 bit/s of TCP/IP.[Source: VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive]
This would mean 2.5Gb/s would require ~ 2.5Ghz CPU, thus ~ 100% of one CPU Core @ 2.5 GHz.
It would be nice to have a similar rule of thumb for storage I/O. I did quick research (googling) but was not able to find any information about CPU requirements for storage I/O. I did a quick test in my home lab and start the synthetic random workload (4KB I/O) on 4vCPU VM on ESXi host having CPU at 2 GHz, where I was able to see 5,000 IOPS with CPU utilization 8.5%. This would mean one 4KB I/O requires 136 Hz.
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| 4KB I/O on 4x vCPU VM with pCPU @ 2 GHz |
And for 64KB I/O size, 1 IOPS requires 161 Hz.
0.5 KB I/O => 512 Bytes I/O (4,096 bits) = 114 Hz
4 KB I/O => 4,096 Bytes I/O (32,768 bits) = 136 Hz
64 KB I/O => 65,536 Bytes I/O (52,4288 bits) = 161 Hz
Based on my observations, it is difficult to define the rule of thumb for 1 Bit/s or Byte/s but rather I would define CPU (Hz) requirements for 1 storage I/O.
Based on multiple assessments of real datacenter environments, I would say that typical average storage I/O size is around 40-50 KB, therefore here is my rule of thumb
1 Storage I/O requires ~ 150 Hz of CPU processingThis would mean 10,000 IOPS would require ~ 1.5 GHz, thus 60% of one CPU Core @ 2.5 GHz.
Please, be aware that this is a very simplified calculation but clearly shows that storage workload is always associated with CPU requirements and it can help with capacity planning and infrastructure sizing.
What do you think about this calculation?
Do you observe different numbers?
Would you calculate it differently?
You can leave the comment below the article.
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