Re: Is there a meaningful benchmark?

Thanks for the references.

-Will

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-general-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Paul Ramsey
Sent: 20 March 2009 13:29
To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Is there a meaningful benchmark?

http://blog.redfin.com/devblog/2007/11/elephant_versus_dolphin_which_is_faster_which_is_smarter.html

Here's another PgSQL/MySQL testimonial, with a spatial twist :)

P

On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 10:15 AM, Greg Smith <gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com> wrote:
> On Fri, 20 Mar 2009, Will Rutherdale (rutherw) wrote:
>
>> However, keeping the KISS principle in mind, you can create a benchmark
>> that simply sets up a sample database and forks off a bunch of processes
>> to do random updates for an hour, say.  Dead simple.
>
> There's a benchmark tool that does something like this that comes with
> PostgreSQL named pgbench.  A MySQL-oriented tool named sysbench also can do
> that, and it supports running against PostgreSQL as well--badly though, so
> it's hard to use that to do a fair comparison.
>
> Simple benchmarks tend to measure only one thing though, and it's often not
> what you think you're measuring.  For example, pgbench produces a
> transactions/per second number.  It's useful for comparing the relative
> performance between two PostgreSQL instances, and people think it gives you
> an idea of transactional performance.  What the actual magnitude of the
> result measures in many cases is instead how well the generated data set
> fits in cache.
>
> If you're doing something update heavy, a lot of the time what you actually
> will measure is how fast your disk can seek, process a disk commit done
> using fsync, or some combination of the two.  If you're not careful to make
> sure you're using the same level of disk commit guarantee on both
> installations, it's real easy to get bad benchmark results here. The intro
> to that subject from the PostgreSQL perspective is at
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/wal-reliability.html
>
> On MySQL, the parameters that controls this behavior are described starting
> at
> http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-parameters.html#sysvar_innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit
>
> For something with lots of disk commits, it's critical that you have both
> systems configured identically here.
>
> --
> * Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD
>
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