seek-scaling automates running the sysbench seek tests and plotting the results. It is currently compatible with Linux only. The main non-portable requirement is the fact that it clears the operating system cache between each test run in a Linux-specific way. The program must be run as root in order to work.
Currently all of the input parameters to the program are hard-coded into the scripts. Edit the following:
- seek-scaling: Set the description of the device being tested (DESCR), what filename to store the text format results (FILENAME), what to name the graph of the results (GRAPH), and the directory to create the test files and runn against (TESTDIR), and where the sysbench executable is located at (PREFIX)
- seek-scaling-sysbench: Set the size of the data set (GBSIZE) and what type of test to run (MODE).
You can also adjust parameters like the number of threads and the amount of time to run the test, but changing those shouldn't be necessary for most tests.
The useful testing modes for seek-scaling are:
- rndrd: random read (the default)
- rndwr: random write
- rndrw: combined random read/write
- seqwr: sequential write
- seqrd: sequential read
The program assumes you have sysbench in your PATH, or installed in the 0.4 subdirectory of your home directory. Installation instructions for that program are below.
seek-scaling requires that the sysbench program be installed. The stable 0.4 version is recommended. The packaged releases of sysbench are difficult to compile on many systems. Those problems are most easily resolved by installing the latest development snapshot instead, where the build issues are fixed. Assuming you have the bazaar version control system installed, the developer snapshot can be installed into your home directory like this:
cd
bzr checkout https://code.launchpad.net/~sysbench-developers/sysbench/0.4/
cd 0.4
./autogen.sh
./configure --without-mysql
makeYou don't need to install sysbench to use it for seek-scaling. Whether or not the included by default MySQL support is installed in sysbench doesn't matter to the program either.
If your server doesn't/can't have bazaar installed, you might archive the source code from a system that does and copy it over, such as:
cd bzr checkout https://code.launchpad.net/~sysbench-developers/sysbench/0.4/ tar cvfz sysbench-0.4.tar.gz 0.4 scp sysbench-0.4.tar.gz user@testhost: ssh user@testhost tar xvfz sysbench-0.4.tar.gz
And then follow the above instructions to compile the program.
seek-scaling is a rough set of scripts so far. Plans for improving the program include:
- Make all of the input parameters into script inputs (or perhaps a config file)
- Handle the fact that seek-scaling-sysbench must be run as root, but root's home directory is likely not where sysbench 0.4 is installed at, better
- When running the program multiple times, look for the test files and skip preparing them if found.
- Provide a proper interface to execute sysbench cleanup.
- Give examples of combining multiple files of output into a single graph.
The documentation README.rst for the program is in ReST markup. Tools that operate on ReST can be used to make versions of it formatted for other purposes, such as rst2html to make a HTML version.
The project is hosted at http://github.com/gregs1104/seek-scaling
If you have any hints, changes or improvements, please contact:
- Greg Smith greg@2ndQuadrant.com
Published sample seek-scaling results published benefitted from private contributions all over the world. Most submissions ask to remain anonymous.
seek-scaling is licensed under a standard 3-clause BSD license.
Copyright (c) 2011-2013, Gregory Smith All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
- Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
- Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
- Neither the name of the author nor the names of contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.
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