How to benchmark performance¶
The performance of your LXD server or cluster depends on a lot of different factors, ranging from the hardware, the server configuration, the selected storage driver and the network bandwidth to the overall usage patterns.
To find the optimal configuration, you should run benchmark tests to evaluate different setups.
LXD provides a benchmarking tool for this purpose. This tool allows you to initialize or launch a number of containers and measure the time it takes for the system to create the containers. If you run this tool repeatedly with different configurations, you can compare the performance and evaluate which is the ideal configuration.
Get the tool¶
To get the lxd-benchmark tool, you can download a pre-built binary:
Download the
bin.linux.lxd-benchmarktool (bin.linux.lxd-benchmark.aarch64orbin.linux.lxd-benchmark.x86_64) from the Assets section of the latest LXD release.Save the binary as
lxd-benchmarkand make it executable (usually by runningchmod u+x lxd-benchmark).
If you have go (Go) installed, you can build the tool with the following command:
go install github.com/canonical/lxd/lxd-benchmark@latest
Run the tool¶
Run lxd-benchmark [action] to measure the performance of your LXD setup.
The benchmarking tool uses the current LXD configuration, but users of the snap must export the LXD_DIR variable for the configuration to be found:
export LXD_DIR=/var/snap/lxd/common/lxd
If you want to use a different project, specify it with --project.
For all actions, you can specify the number of parallel threads to use (default is to use a dynamic batch size). You can also choose to append the results to a CSV report file and label them in a certain way.
See lxd-benchmark help for all available actions and flags.
Select an image¶
Before you run the benchmark, select what kind of image you want to use.
- Local image
If you want to measure the time it takes to create a container and ignore the time it takes to download the image, you should copy the image to your local image store before you run the benchmarking tool.
To do so, run a command similar to the following and specify the fingerprint (for example,
2d21da400963) of the image when you runlxd-benchmark:lxc image copy ubuntu:24.04 local:
You can also assign an alias to the image and specify that alias (for example,
ubuntu) when you runlxd-benchmark:lxc image copy ubuntu:24.04 local: --alias ubuntu
- Remote image
If you want to include the download time in the overall result, specify a remote image (for example,
ubuntu:24.04). The default image thatlxd-benchmarkuses is the latest Ubuntu image (ubuntu:), so if you want to use this image, you can leave out the image name when running the tool.
Create and launch containers¶
Run the following command to create a number of containers:
lxd-benchmark init --count <number> <image>
Add --privileged to the command to create privileged containers.
For example:
Command |
Description |
|---|---|
|
Create ten privileged containers that use the latest Ubuntu image. |
|
Create 20 containers that use the Ubuntu Minimal 24.04 image, using four parallel threads. |
|
Create one container that uses the local image with the fingerprint |
|
Create ten containers that use the image with the alias |
If you use the init action, the benchmarking containers are created but not started.
To start the containers that you created, run the following command:
lxd-benchmark start
Alternatively, use the launch action to both create and start the containers:
lxd-benchmark launch --count 10 <image>
For this action, you can add the --freeze flag to freeze each container right after it starts.
Freezing a container pauses its processes, so this flag allows you to measure the pure launch times without interference of the processes that run in each container after startup.
Delete containers¶
To delete the benchmarking containers that you created, run the following command:
lxd-benchmark delete
Note
You must delete all existing benchmarking containers before you can run a new benchmark.