About

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

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 General command line options 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 OLTP tests.
• run: runs the actual test specified with the --test 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 option.

Also you can use sysbench help (without --test) 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).