sysbench is a modular, cross-platform and multi-threaded benchmark tool for evaluating OS parameters that are important for a system running a database under intensive load.

The idea of this benchmark suite is to quickly get an impression about system performance without setting up complex database benchmarks or even without installing a database at all.

Current features allow to test the following system parameters:

• file I/O performance

• scheduler performance

• memory allocation and transfer speed

• POSIX threads implementation performance

• database server performance

./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install

The above will build sysbench with MySQL support by default. If you have MySQL headers and libraries in non-standard locations (and no mysql_config can be found in the PATH), you can specify them explicitly with --with-mysql-includes and --with-mysql-libs options to ./configure.

To compile sysbench without MySQL support, use --without-mysql. In this case all database-related tests will not work, but other tests will be functional.

See README-WIN.txt for instructions on Windows builds.

See README-Oracle.md for instructions on building with Oracle client libraries.

The general command line syntax for sysbench is:

	  sysbench [options]... [testname] [command] 

• testname is an optional name of a built-in test (e.g. fileio, memory, cpu, etc.), or a name of one of the bundled Lua scripts (e.g. oltp_read_only), or a path to a custom Lua script. If no test name is specified on the command line (and thus, there is no command too, as in that case it would be parsed as a testname), or the test name is a dash ("-"), then sysbench expects a Lua script to execute on its standard input.

• command is an optional argument that will be passed by sysbench to the built-in test or script specified with testname. command defines the action that must be performed by the test. The list of available commands depends on a particular test. Some tests also implement their own custom commands.

  Below is a description of typical test commands and their purpose:

  • prepare: performs preparative actions for those tests which need them, e.g. creating the necessary files on disk for the fileio test, or filling the test database for database benchmarks.
  • run: runs the actual test specified with the testname argument. This command is provided by all tests.
  • cleanup: removes temporary data after the test run in those tests which create one.
  • help: displays usage information for the test specified with the testname argument. This includes the full list of commands provided by the test, so it should be used to get the available commands.

• options is a list of zero or more command line options starting with '--'. As with commands, the sysbench testname help command should be used to describe available options provided by a particular test.

  See General command line options for a description of general options provided by sysbench itself.

You can use sysbench --help to display the general command line syntax and options.

The table below lists the supported common options, their descriptions and default values:

Note that numerical values for all size options (like --thread-stack-size in this table) may be specified by appending the corresponding multiplicative suffix (K for kilobytes, M for megabytes, G for gigabytes and T for terabytes).