Chapter 2. Benchmarking MySQL
Benchmarking is an essential skill for MySQL novices and power users alike. A benchmark, simply put, is a workload designed to stress your system. The usual goal is to learn about the system’s behavior, but there are other worthwhile reasons for running benchmarks, such as reproducing a desired system state or burning in new hardware. In this chapter we’ll explore reasons, strategies, tactics, and tools for benchmarking MySQL and MySQL-based applications. We’ll focus especially on sysbench, because it’s an excellent tool for MySQL benchmarking.
Why Benchmark?
Why is benchmarking so important? It’s because benchmarking is uniquely convenient and effective for studying what happens when you give systems work to do. A benchmark can help you observe the system’s behavior under load, determine the system’s capacity, learn which changes are important, or see how your application performs with different data. Benchmarking lets you create fictional circumstances, beyond the real conditions you can observe. You can do these things and more with benchmarks:
Validate your assumptions about the system, and see whether your assumptions are realistic.
Reproduce a bad behavior you’re trying to eliminate in the system.
Measure how your application currently performs. If you don’t know how fast it currently runs, you can’t be sure any changes you make are helpful. You can also use historical benchmark results to diagnose problems you didn’t foresee.
Simulate a higher load ...
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