The Good, the Blog & the Ugly - Tim Cook's Weblog

New Feature for Sysbench - Generate Transactions at a Steady Rate

Perhaps I am becoming a regular patcher of sysbench...

I have developed a new feature for sysbench - the ability to generate transactions at a steady rate determined by the user.

This mode is enabled using the following two new options:

--tx-rate

Rate at which sysbench should attempt to send transactions to the database, in transactions per second. This is independent of num_threads. The default is 0, which means to send as many as possible (i.e., do not pause between the end of one transaction and the start of another. It is also independent of other options like --oltp-user-delay-min and --oltp-user-delay-max, which add think time between individual statements generated by sysbench.

--tx-jitter

Magnitude of the variation in time to start transactions at, in microseconds. The default is zero, which asks each thread to vary its transaction period by up to 10 percent (i.e. 10^6 / tx-rate * num-threads / 10). A standard pseudo-random number generator is used to decide each transaction start time.

My need for these options is simple - I want to generate a steady load for my MySQL database. It is one thing to measure the maximum achievable throughput as you change your database configuration, hardware, or num-threads. I am also interested in how the system (or just mysqld's) utilization changes, at the same transaction rate, when I change other variables.

An upcoming post will demonstrate a use of sysbench in this mode.

For the moment my new feature can be added to sysbench 0.4.12 (and probably many earlier versions) via this patch. These changes are tested on Solaris, but I did choose only APIs that are documented as also available on Linux. I have also posted my patch on sourceforge as a sysbench feature enhancement request.

Posted at 03:42PM Apr 06, 2009 by timc in Performance  |  Comments[2]