SysBench

SysBench is a modular, cross-platform and multi-threaded benchmark tool for evaluating OS parameters that are important for a system running a database under intensive load.

The idea of this benchmark suite is to quickly get an impression about system performance without setting up complex database benchmarks or even without installing a database at all.

Features of SysBench

Current features allow to test the following system parameters:

• file I/O performance

• scheduler performance

• memory allocation and transfer speed

• POSIX threads implementation performance

• database server performance

Installation

./autogen.sh
./configure
make

The above will build SysBench with MySQL support by default. If you have MySQL headers and libraries in non-standard locations (and no mysql_config can be found in the PATH), you can specify them explicitly with --with-mysql-includes and --with-mysql-libs options to ./configure.

To compile SysBench without MySQL support, use --without-mysql. In this case all database-related tests will not work, but other tests will be functional.

Usage

General syntax

The general syntax for SysBench is as follows:

	  sysbench [common-options] --test=name [test-options] command

See ? for a description of common options and documentation for particular test mode for a list of test-specific options.

Below is a brief description of available commands and their purpose:

prepare
Performs preparative actions for those tests which need them, e.g. creating the necessary files on disk for the

fileio

test, or filling the test database for the

oltp

test.

run
Runs the actual test specified with the

--test=

name

option.

cleanup
Removes temporary data after the test run in those tests which create one.

help
Displays usage information for a test specified with the

--test=

name

option.

Also you can use sysbench help to display the brief usage summary and the list of available test modes.

General command line options

The table below lists the supported common options, their descriptions and default values:

|-----------------------|---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|-----------------| | Option | Description | Default value | | --num-threads | The total number of worker threads to create | 1 | | --max-requests | Limit for total number of requests. 0 means unlimited | 10000 | | --max-time | Limit for total execution time in seconds. 0 (default) means unlimited | 0 | | --thread-stack-size | Size of stack for each thread | 32K | | --init-rng | Specifies if random numbers generator should be initialized from timer before the test start | off | | --report-interval | Periodically report intermediate statistics with a specified interval in seconds. Note that statistics produced by this option is per-interval rather than cumulative. 0 disables intermediate reports | 0 | | --test | Name of the test mode to run | Required | | --debug | Print more debug info | off | | --validate | Perform validation of test results where possible | off | | --help | Print help on general syntax or on a test mode specified with --test, and exit | off | | --verbosity | Verbosity level (0 - only critical messages, 5 - debug) | 4 | | --percentile | SysBench measures execution times for all processed requests to display statistical information like minimal, average and maximum execution time. For most benchmarks it is also useful to know a request execution time value matching some percentile (e.g. 95% percentile means we should drop 5% of the most long requests and choose the maximal value from the remaining ones).

                     This option allows to specify a percentile rank of query execution times to count                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      | 95              |

| --validate | Perform validation of test results where possible | off |

Note that numerical values for all size options (like --thread-stack-size in this table) may be specified by appending the corresponding multiplicative suffix (K for kilobytes, M for megabytes, G for gigabytes and T for terabytes).