Given the recent excitement & interest around OpenStack I wanted to make sure I was ready to conduct appropriate evaluations of system performance.  I generally turn to sysbench since it comes with a variety of different tests (accessed via –test= option interface), including:

• fileio – File I/O test
• cpu – CPU performance test
• memory – Memory functions speed test
• threads – Threads subsystem performance test
• mutex – Mutex performance test

As you can see, sysbench lets you stress many of the fundamental components of your hardware and infrastructure, such as your disk subsystem, along with your CPUs and memory. An additional option exists that is designed to perform synthetic stress testing of MySQL, and I was surprised when I didn’t see it in the above list on version 0.5, as it used to show up as “oltp – OLTP test”. What happened to …

Normally, sysbench 0.4.12 version can be installed from repositories like “apt-get install sysbench” but the newer version 0.5 is not added in any repo yet (AFAIK) so, it’s bit difficult to install it.

1. Install bzr package if it’s not installed. (i.e apt-get install bzr)

2. Download the code from branch. (i.e bzr branch lp:sysbench)  https://code.launchpad.net/~sysbench-developers/sysbench/0.5

root@deb-pxc56-2:~# bzr branch lp:sysbench
You have not informed bzr of your Launchpad ID, and you must do this to
write to Launchpad or access private data. See "bzr help launchpad-login".
Branched 122 revisions. 
root@deb-pxc56-2:~#

3. Before you compile code from the branch, you need some of the packages to be installed If they are not.

apt-get install automake
apt-get install libtool
apt-get install libmysqlclient-dev
apt-get …