Обсуждение: Postgres benchmark?

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Postgres benchmark?

От
David Siebert
Дата:
I am interesting in finding a good Postgres benchmark. I an not
interested in seeing how fast Postgres is compared to MySql, Firebird,
or any other SQL database.
What I am interested in is how file systems, memory, and X-64 vs X-32
effects the performance of Postgres.
It is more for my own curiosity to be honest. Right now Postgres is more
than fast enough for what I am doing.


Re: Postgres benchmark?

От
Craig Ringer
Дата:
David Siebert wrote:
> I am interesting in finding a good Postgres benchmark. I an not
> interested in seeing how fast Postgres is compared to MySql, Firebird,
> or any other SQL database.
> What I am interested in is how file systems, memory, and X-64 vs X-32
> effects the performance of Postgres.
> It is more for my own curiosity to be honest. Right now Postgres is more
> than fast enough for what I am doing.

Do you want to use PostgreSQL for any particular task? If so, the best
benchmark is probably one that simulates your specific workload.
Comparing generic benchmark results like pgbench etc may not usefully
reflect performance in real-world use with your load and your data.

--
Craig Ringer

Re: Postgres benchmark?

От
Mayuresh Nirhali
Дата:
Craig Ringer wrote:
> David Siebert wrote:
>> I am interesting in finding a good Postgres benchmark. I an not
>> interested in seeing how fast Postgres is compared to MySql, Firebird,
>> or any other SQL database.
>> What I am interested in is how file systems, memory, and X-64 vs X-32
>> effects the performance of Postgres.
>> It is more for my own curiosity to be honest. Right now Postgres is more
>> than fast enough for what I am doing.
>
> Do you want to use PostgreSQL for any particular task? If so, the best
> benchmark is probably one that simulates your specific workload.
> Comparing generic benchmark results like pgbench etc may not usefully
> reflect performance in real-world use with your load and your data.
and If you are running Solaris/OpenSolaris, DTrace is your friend.

Mayuresh
>
> --
> Craig Ringer
>


Re: Postgres benchmark?

От
David Siebert
Дата:
Well that is the rub. I am currently using Postgres everyday. It runs
like a champ and even on an old PIII 600 MHZ machine with a single old
and slow IDE drive and 256 megs of ram it is fast enough for what we do.
This is more for me to do some testing with.
I think it would useful as a tunning tool if nothing else.
What I would like to try just for my own amusment is to build a small
test box. It will not be a server class machine. I am thinking of using
an AMD X2 and to start a SATA hard drive.
Then I would like to test different file systems, then different
operating systems, different amounts of ram, 32 vs 64 bit, and software
raids.
I would use the same machine for all the tests so it would have a good
base line.
I doubt that would ever publish my results. The flame war that would
happen would take all the fun out of it for me. I am sure that someone
would say that since I wasn't using a server machine that my results
where invalid, others would say that I made errors in tuning for the
different operating systems or that X would show benefits if I was using
a real server machine. And all of them may be right.
But sometimes you just want to play.


>
> Do you want to use PostgreSQL for any particular task? If so, the best
> benchmark is probably one that simulates your specific workload.
> Comparing generic benchmark results like pgbench etc may not usefully
> reflect performance in real-world use with your load and your data.
>
> --
> Craig Ringer
>
>


Re: Postgres benchmark?

От
Greg Smith
Дата:
On Wed, 2 Jul 2008, David Siebert wrote:

> What I would like to try just for my own amusment is to build a small
> test box. It will not be a server class machine. I am thinking of using
> an AMD X2 and to start a SATA hard drive.

What I did when wanting to run similar experiments was get a moderately
expensive RAID controller (Areca ARC-1210, about $300, there are other
options) and step up to 3 drives--DB, WAL, and OS (two more cheap ATA
drives will set you back another $120).  That's just enough to get you
benchmark results that translate fairly well to server land.  If you don't
don't have a controller with a decent write cache on it, there are all
kinds of write-heavy tests that you can't get results that mean anything
useful on.

> Then I would like to test different file systems, then different
> operating systems, different amounts of ram, 32 vs 64 bit, and software
> raids.

Different operating systems is the hard one here.  My own tests trying to
compare Linux and Solaris on the same hardware gave very different
results, and it's a lot of work to get a fair comparison between two
platforms like that.  A lot of that is not being able to use the same
filesystem in the same way; UFS/ZFS are tuned very differently from ext3
for example.

When you run database benchmarks, the usual setup is to note what ratio
there is between the database and the amount of RAM, because varying the
RAM itself is kind of boring.  You end up with a curve like
http://www.westnet.com/~gsmith/content/postgresql/pgbench-scaling.htm
regardless, how much RAM you have just shifts exactly where the inflection
points are in an unsurprising way.

32/64, file systems, and software RAID are a bit more useful.  A lot of
the filesystem/RAID ground has been explored at these two links:

http://www.commandprompt.com/blogs/joshua_drake/2008/04/is_that_performance_i_smell_ext2_vs_ext3_on_50_spindles_testing_for_postgresql/

http://merlinmoncure.blogspot.com/2007/08/following-are-results-of-our-testing-of.html

> I doubt that would ever publish my results. The flame war that would
> happen would take all the fun out of it for me. I am sure that someone
> would say that since I wasn't using a server machine that my results
> where invalid, others would say that I made errors in tuning for the
> different operating systems or that X would show benefits if I was using
> a real server machine.

What you should do is send out your suggested test plan before you run the
tests and get feedback such that you're more likely to get accurate
results.  There's a lot of useful tests that could be done in this area
that are not too hard to design, but the actual follow-through takes a
long time.  If you wanted to do some of that work, you should be able to
get enough help doing that to end up with worthwhile results in the end.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD