System performance benchmark

System performance benchmark

SysBench - benchmark tool
from MySQL Performance Blog by Vadim
Sysbench is benchmark developed by Alexey Kopytov (software engineer @ MySQL AB)- http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/ and I want to write a short intro about this tool as sysbench is one of software for my everyday use. For example, SUN published their Solaris vs RedHat stuff based on sysbench's results (Peter and me provided performance consutling for this publishing).Sysbench has a lot of options and details so my goal is describe common usage of benchmark.Sysbench allows to test:
file I/O performance
scheduler performance
memory allocation and transfer speed
POSIX threads implementation performance
database server performance
First four is useful for the platform evalution, for example if you want to compare speed of file I/O and implementation of threads on different servers - I will write about in further notes. Regarding database benchmarks - in 0.4.7 and earlier versions Sysbench supported only predefined set of queries, but that will change in version 0.5 where sysbench is scriptable (Lua http://www.lua.org/ as scripting language) , and you can use your own tables and queries. 0.5 should be realesed soon. Originally Sysbench supported only MySQL, but later Oracle and PostgreSQL (and deviations, e.g EnterpriseDB) were added - it is not clear from Docs page, but it is . Sysbench uses only a native API, not middle layers like ODBC, that is why list of supported DB is not wide. Other restriction Sysbench can't be complided on Windows - well you can try and write about your experience. In next notes I'll write how to setup and perform database benchmarks.