Creating compressible data with fio.

Today I used fio to create some compressible data to test on my Nutanix nodes.  I ended up using the following fio params to get what I wanted.

buffer_compress_percentage=50
refill_buffers
buffer_pattern=0xdeadbeef

• buffer_compress_percentage does what you’d expect and specifies how compressible the data is
• refill_buffers Is required to make the above compress percentage do what you’d expect in the large.  IOW, I want the entire file to be compressible by the buffer_compress_percentage amount
• buffer_pattern  This is a big one.  Without setting this pattern, fio will use Null bytes to achieve compressibility, and Nutanix like many other storage vendors will suppress runs of Zero’s and so the data reduction will mostly be from zero suppression rather than from compression.

Much of this is well explained in the README for latest version of fio.

Also NOTE  Older versions of fio do not support many of the fancy data creation flags, but will not alert you to the fact that fio is ignoring them. I spent quite a bit of time wondering why my data was not compressed, until I downloaded and compiled the latest fio.