OLTP Benchmark - Spreading out the I/O

The Fastest DBA Contest benchmark was run against a server with only 1 disk so spreading out the I/O over multiple dbspaces wouldn't do too much good. My server has access to multiple RAID10 sets that are made up of 6 to 10 drives each so I think I can get some benefit from spreading out the I/O. dbspace1 has 6 drives, dbspaces 2 and 3 have 8 drives and dbspace 4 has 10 drives.

After the last benchmark I ran the following SQL against the sysmaster database to identify the I/O for each table and index

select
tabname::char(20) tab,
(pagreads + pagwrites) io,
pagreads,
pagwrites
from
sysptprof
where
dbsname = "ptpcc" and
tabname not matches ("sys*")
order by
(pagreads + pagwrites) desc;

...

tab                             io    pagreads   pagwrites

stock                       833785      417350      416435
customer                    226990      134711       92279
order_line                   75287       42206       33081
stock_pk                     45504       45504           0
oorder_uix1                  36457       23932       12525
oorder                       29367       26773        2594
order_line_pk                27214       11809       15405
oorder_pk                    19565       16879        2686
customer_pk                  17865       17865           0
new_order_pk                  8496        6196        2300
district                      4793        4745          48
customer_ix1                  3894        3894           0
item                          3773        3773           0
new_order                     1979         773        1206
history                       1522          12        1510
item_pk                        815         815           0
warehouse                       11           5           6
district_pk                      7           7           0
warehouse_pk                     1           1           0

Using this information I can place my tables and indexes in the appropriate dbspaces to spread the reads and writes across my disks evenly (giving the RAID10 set with 10 disks more I/Os to do and the RAID10 set with only 6 disks less I/Os to do) and hopefully improve my benchmark TPM.

Here is how I chose to distribute my data

stock dbspace4
customer dbspace3
order_line dbspace2
stock_pk dbspace1
oorder_uix1 dbspace2
oorder dbspace2
order_line_pk dbspace1
oorder_pk dbspace1
customer_pk dbspace2
new_order_pk dbspace1
district dbspace2
customer_ix1 dbspace1
item dbspace2
new_order dbspace1
history dbspace2
item_pk dbspace1
warehouse dbspace2
district_pk dbspace1
warehouse_pk dbspace2

Making these changes and rerunning the benchmark gives us a TPM of 6187, an improvement of almost 5%. Not exactly the barn burning results I was hoping for, most likely a result of reducing our I/O by increasing out buffers but it is an improvement.