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AWS Documentation » Amazon EC2 » User Guide for Linux Instances » Storage » Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS) » Amazon EBS Volume Performance on Linux Instances » Initializing Amazon EBS Volumes

Initializing Amazon EBS Volumes

New EBS volumes receive their maximum performance the moment that they are available and do not require initialization (formerly known as pre-warming). However, storage blocks on volumes that were restored from snapshots must be initialized (pulled down from Amazon S3 and written to the volume) before you can access the block. This preliminary action takes time and can cause a significant increase in the latency of an I/O operation the first time each block is accessed. For most applications, amortizing this cost over the lifetime of the volume is acceptable. Performance is restored after the data is accessed once.

You can avoid this performance hit in a production environment by reading from all of the blocks on your volume before you use it; this process is called initialization. For a new volume created from a snapshot, you should read all the blocks that have data before using the volume.

Important

While initializing io1 volumes that were restored from snapshots, the performance of the volume may drop below 50 percent of its expected level, which causes the volume to display a warning state in the I/O Performance status check. This is expected, and you can ignore the warning state on io1 volumes while you are initializing them. For more information, see Monitoring Volumes with Status Checks.

Initializing Amazon EBS Volumes on Linux

New EBS volumes receive their maximum performance the moment that they are available and do not require initialization (formerly known as pre-warming). For volumes that have been restored from snapshots, use the dd or fio utilities to read from all of the blocks on a volume. All existing data on the volume will be preserved.

To initialize a volume restored from a snapshot on Linux

  1. Attach the newly-restored volume to your Linux instance.

  2. Use the lsblk command to list the block devices on your instance. 

    Copy
    [ec2-user ~]$ lsblk
NAME  MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
xvdf  202:80   0  30G  0 disk
xvda1 202:1    0   8G  0 disk /

    Here you can see that the new volume, /dev/xvdf, is attached, but not mounted (because there is no path listed under the MOUNTPOINT column).

  3. Use the dd or fio utilities to read all of the blocks on the device. The dd command is installed by default on Linux systems, but fio is considerably faster because it allows multi-threaded reads.

    Note

    This step may take several minutes up to several hours, depending on your EC2 instance bandwidth, the IOPS provisioned for the volume, and the size of the volume.

    [dd] The if (input file) parameter should be set to the drive you wish to initialize. The of (output file) parameter should be set to the Linux null virtual device, /dev/null. The bs parameter sets the block size of the read operation; for optimal performance, this should be set to 1 MB. 

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    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo dd if=/dev/xvdf of=/dev/null bs=1M

    [fio] If you have fio installed on your system, use the following command initialize your volume. The --filename (input file) parameter should be set to the drive you wish to initialize. 

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    [ec2-user ~]$ sudo fio --filename=/dev/xvdf --rw=read --bs=128k --iodepth=32 --ioengine=libaio --direct=1 --name=volume-initialize

    To install fio on Amazon Linux, use the following command: 

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    sudo yum install -y fio

    To install fio on Ubuntu, use the following command: 

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    sudo apt-get install -y fio

    When the operation is finished, you will see a report of the read operation. Your volume is now ready for use. For more information, see Making an Amazon EBS Volume Available for Use.