Who never had to measure the disk performances on a system?

Speaking about Linux performance monitoring includes a significant part of disk performances. If you are facing applications or databases running slower than expected or than on other environments, you may take a look on the I/O performances.
This posting aims to provide an introduction to a pretty interesting tool: IOzone.

Since Oracle 11.2, Oracle provides ORION in the RDBMS binaries (in ${ORACLE_HOME}/bin). ORION - ORacle Input Output Numbers - is an I/O calibration tool allowing to simulating and testing I/O performances an Oracle database would be confronted with. ORION basically supports four kinds of database activities based on either small or large I/O. ORION can, as any respectable I/O simulation tool, generate an adapted workload using a given percentage of reads and write operations.

You do not want to install or configure swingbench, load runner etc. - just to test the performance of your I/O system based on filesystems? Then Flexible I/O is the right tool for you. This post provides an overview.

Have you ever noticed strange figures while collecting the Oracle optimizer system statistics ? If so, you need to provide the optimizer with the correct number, as explained in this posting.