On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 2:39 PM, Merlin Moncure <mmoncure@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 19, 2009 at 4:10 PM, Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> You can use pgbench to either get interesting peak read results, or peak
>> write ones, but it's not real useful for things in between. The standard
>> test basically turns into a huge stack of writes to a single table, and the
>> select-only one is interesting to gauge either cached or uncached read speed
>> (depending on the scale). It's not very useful for getting a feel for how
>> something with a mixed read/write workload does though, which is unfortunate
>> because I think that scenario is much more common than what it does test.
>
> all true, but it's pretty easy to rig custom (-f) commands for
> virtually any test you want,.
My primary use of pgbench is to exercise a machine as a part of
acceptance testing. After using it to do power plug pulls, I run it
for a week or two to exercise the drive array and controller mainly.
Any machine that runs smooth for a week with a load factor of 20 or 30
and the amount of updates that pgbench generates don't overwhelm it
I'm pretty happy.