Re: IO scheduler vs PostgreSQL performance measurement

On Mon, 17 Mar 2003, Nick Piggin wrote:

> Dear PostgreSQL hackers,
> I am developing a disk IO scheduler for Linux and am aiming to
> have it included in the stable 2.6 release. Due to its design,
> performance regressions do appear, and are often more specific
> to the workload in question than with other schedulers, hence
> one has to go beyond the generic benchmarks.
> 
> Databases are one area of difficulty due to multi threaded IO
> and sync writes.
> 
> I would appreciate it if you could give me a suggestion
> for a not-too-difficult to set up or interpret PostgreSQL
> benchmark with a reasonable running time (< an hour or so)
> which I can add to my performance regression tests.
> 
> It would be good if this were to separately measure most
> common types of PostgreSQL IO work, and from there I would
> leave specific areas to those interested.
> 
> I apologise for asking when I could search, however I am
> interested in something up to date and which developers on
> this can agree on.

For quick and dirty testing under high parallel load, you can use pgbench, 
which comes with postgres.  

cd /usr/local/src/postgresql-7.3.x/contrib/pgbench
make
make install
pgbench -i
pgbench -c 4 -t 100

For more intense testing, look at OSDB the Open Source database benchmark 
suite:

http://osdb.sourceforge.net/