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.

Thank you all for your time.
Best regards,
Nick Piggin


Mon, 17 Mar 2003 01:56:13 +1100
Nick Piggin <piggin@cyberone.com.au>
IO scheduler vs PostgreSQL performance measurement
Hi,

> 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.

Check out `make check', a regression test which ships with Postgres, and
pgbench, a TPC-like benchmark, in contrib/.

Gavin


Mon, 24 Mar 2003 11:07:17 +1100 (EST)
Gavin Sherry <swm@linuxworld.com.au>
Re: IO scheduler vs PostgreSQL performance measurement
Gavin Sherry wrote:

>Hi,
>
>  
>
>>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.
>>    
>>
>
>Check out `make check', a regression test which ships with Postgres, and
>pgbench, a TPC-like benchmark, in contrib/.
>  
>
Great, thank you.


Mon, 24 Mar 2003 13:12:29 +1100
Nick Piggin <piggin@cyberone.com.au>
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/


Mon, 24 Mar 2003 11:17:12 -0700 (MST)
"scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com>
Re: IO scheduler vs PostgreSQL performance measurement
scott.marlowe wrote:

>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/
>
>
>
Thanks for the references. I'll do a few pgbench runs today comparing
different schedulers so I'll CC you the results if you like.


Tue, 25 Mar 2003 09:30:50 +1100
Nick Piggin <piggin@cyberone.com.au>
Re: IO scheduler vs PostgreSQL performance measurement