pgbench README 2005/10/04 Tatsuo Ishii
o What is pgbench?
pgbench is a simple program to run a benchmark test sort of
"TPC-B". pgbench is a client application of PostgreSQL and runs
with PostgreSQL only. It performs lots of small and simple
transactions including select/update/insert operations then
calculates number of transactions successfully completed within a
second (transactions per second, tps). Targeting data includes a
table with at least 100k tuples.
Example outputs from pgbench look like:
number of clients: 4
number of transactions per client: 100
number of processed transactions: 400/400
tps = 19.875015(including connections establishing)
tps = 20.098827(excluding connections establishing)
Similar program called "JDBCBench" already exists, but it requires
Java that may not be available on every platform. Moreover some
people concerned about the overhead of Java that might lead
inaccurate results. So I decided to write in pure C, and named
it "pgbench."
o features of pgbench
- pgbench is written in C using libpq only. So it is very portable
and easy to install.
- pgbench can simulate concurrent connections using asynchronous
capability of libpq. No threading is required.
o How to install pgbench
$make
$make install
o How to use pgbench?
(1) Initialize database by:
pgbench -i <dbname>
where <dbname> is the name of database. pgbench uses four tables
accounts, branches, history and tellers. These tables will be
destroyed. Be very careful if you have tables having same
names. Default test data contains:
table # of tuples
-------------------------
branches 1
tellers 10
accounts 100000
history 0
You can increase the number of tuples by using -s option. See
below.
(2) Run the benchmark test
pgbench <dbname>
The default configuration is:
number of clients: 1
number of transactions per client: 10
o options
pgbench has number of options.
-h hostname
hostname where the backend is running. If this option
is omitted, pgbench will connect to the localhost via
Unix domain socket.
-p port
the port number that the backend is accepting. default is
libpq's default, usually 5432.
-c number_of_clients
Number of clients simulated. default is 1.
-t number_of_transactions
Number of transactions each client runs. default is 10.
-s scaling_factor
this should be used with -i (initialize) option.
number of tuples generated will be multiple of the
scaling factor. For example, -s 100 will imply 10M
(10,000,000) tuples in the accounts table.
default is 1. NOTE: scaling factor should be at least
as large as the largest number of clients you intend
to test; else you'll mostly be measuring update contention.
-U login
Specify db user's login name if it is different from
the Unix login name.
-P password
Specify the db password. CAUTION: using this option
might be a security hole since ps command will
show the password. Use this for TESTING PURPOSE ONLY.
-n
No vacuuming and cleaning the history table prior to the
test is performed.
-v
Do vacuuming before testing. This will take some time.
With neither -n nor -v, pgbench will vacuum tellers and
branches tables only.
-S
Perform select only transactions instead of TPC-B.
-N Do not update "branches" and "tellers". This will
avoid heavy update contention on branches and tellers,
while it will not make pgbench supporting TPC-B like
transactions.
-f filename
Read transaction script from file. Detailed
explanation will appear later.
-C
Establish connection for each transaction, rather than
doing it just once at beginning of pgbench in the normal
mode. This is useful to measure the connection overhead.
-l
Write the time taken by each transaction to a logfile,
with the name "pgbench_log.xxx", where xxx is the PID
of the pgbench process. The format of the log is:
client_id transaction_no time
where time is measured in microseconds.
-d
debug option.
o What is the "transaction" actually performed in pgbench?
(1) begin;
(2) update accounts set abalance = abalance + :delta where aid = :aid;
(3) select abalance from accounts where aid = :aid;
(4) update tellers set tbalance = tbalance + :delta where tid = :tid;
(5) update branches set bbalance = bbalance + :delta where bid = :bid;
(6) insert into history(tid,bid,aid,delta) values(:tid,:bid,:aid,:delta);
(7) end;
o -f option
This supports for reading transaction script from a specified
file. This file should include SQL commands in each line. SQL
command consists of multiple lines are not supported. Empty lines
and lines begging with "--" will be ignored.
Multiple -f options are allowed. In this case each transaction is
assigned randomly chosen script.
SQL commands can include "meta command" which begins with "\" (back
slash). A meta command takes some arguments separted by white
spaces. Currently following meta command is supported:
\setrandom name min max
assign random integer to name between min and max
example:
\setrandom aid 1 100000
variables can be reffered to in SQL comands by adding ":" in front
of the varible name.
example:
SELECT abalance FROM accounts WHERE aid = :aid
For example, TPC-B like benchmark can be defined as follows(scaling
factor = 1):
\setrandom aid 1 100000
\setrandom bid 1 1
\setrandom tid 1 10
\setrandom delta 1 10000
BEGIN
UPDATE accounts SET abalance = abalance + :delta WHERE aid = :aid
SELECT abalance FROM accounts WHERE aid = :aid
UPDATE tellers SET tbalance = tbalance + :delta WHERE tid = :tid
UPDATE branches SET bbalance = bbalance + :delta WHERE bid = :bid
INSERT INTO history (tid, bid, aid, delta, mtime) VALUES (:tid, :bid, :aid, :delta, 'now')
END
o License?
Basically it is same as BSD license. See pgbench.c for more details.
o History
2005/09/29
* add -f option. contributed by Tomoaki Sato.
[updation records were missing]
2003/11/26
* create indexes after data insertion to reduce time.
patch from Yutaka Tanida.
2003/06/10
* fix uninitialized memory bug
* add support for PGHOST, PGPORT, PGUSER environment variables
2002/07/20
* patch contributed by Neil Conway.
* code/document clean up and add -l option.
2002/02/24
* do not CHECKPOINT anymore while initializing benchmark
* database. Add -N option.
2001/10/24
* "time"->"mtime"
2001/09/09
* Add -U, -P, -C options
2000/1/15 pgbench-1.2 contributed to PostgreSQL
* Add -v option
1999/09/29 pgbench-1.1 released
* Apply cygwin patches contributed by Yutaka Tanida
* More robust when backends die
* Add -S option (select only)
1999/09/04 pgbench-1.0 released
