Date: Tue, 07 Nov 2006 14:52:09 +1300
From: Mark Kirkwood <markir@paradise.net.nz>
Subject: Re: Easy read-heavy benchmark kicking around?
In-reply-to: <454F9F62.9070408@janestcapital.com>
To: Brian Hurt <bhurt@janestcapital.com>
Cc: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Message-id: <454FE6C9.7060404@paradise.net.nz>
MIME-version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.7 (X11/20061101)
References: <20061102160057.GA26580@oppetid.no>
	<454F9F62.9070408@janestcapital.com>

Brian Hurt wrote:
> I'm having a spot of problem with out storage device vendor.  Read 
> performance (as measured by both bonnie++ and hdparm -t) is abysmal 
> (~14Mbyte/sec), and we're trying to get them to fix it.  Unfortunately, 
> they're using the fact that bonnie++ is an open source benchmark to 
> weasle out of doing anything- they can't fix it unless I can show an 
> impact in Postgresql.
> 
> So the question is: is there an easy to install and run, read-heavy 
> benchmark out there that I can wave at them to get them to fix the 
> problem?  I have a second database running on a single SATA drive, so I 
> can use that as a comparison point- "look, we're getting 1/3rd the read 
> speed of a single SATA drive- this sucks!"
> 

You could use the lineitem table from the TPC-H dataset 
(http://www.tpc.org/tpch/default.asp).

Generate the dataset for a scale factor that makes lineitem about 2x 
your ram, load the table and do:

SELECT count(*) FROM lineitem

vmstat or iostat while this is happening should display your meager 
throughput well enough to get your vendors attention (I'm checking this 
on a fairly old 4 disk system of mine as I type this - I'm seeing about 
90Mb/s...)

best wishes

Mark