spew: For testing purposes

I’m suddenly inundated with testing a half-dozen new laptops here, so I don’t have a lot of time for writing up posts.

I did have a moment this morning to check out spew, which I believe is in the Debian repos, in Fedora and in their derivatives, but surprisingly not in Arch.

spew is a tool for testing I/O performance and generating workloads for those tests. What you see above is spew’s text-based interface, writing out a quick 128Mb file and checking the read-write stats.

By default spew works mostly in a CLI-fashion, as opposed to the whole-screen approach you see above. We haven’t seen too many I/O tools for the console — not counting iotop, which was the first one I could think of offhand — so it’s probably a good idea to keep this one around.

The next time I get an ancient laptop and a wicked-slow hard drive, I’m going to hunt down spew and see what it can tell me. Next time. 😉