sysbench

CPU benchmark

$ sysbench cpu run

$ sysbench cpu --threads=[4] run

$ sysbench memory run

$ sysbench fileio --file-total-size=[10G] prepare

$ sysbench fileio --file-total-size=[10G] --file-test-mode=[rndrw] run

$ sysbench oltp_read_write --mysql-host=[localhost] --mysql-user=[user] --mysql-password=[pass] --mysql-db=[test] run

$ sysbench fileio --file-total-size=[10G] cleanup

sysbench [test] [--threads n] [options] [prepare|run|cleanup]

sysbench is a multi-threaded benchmarking tool for evaluating system performance across CPU, memory, file I/O, and database workloads. It provides consistent, reproducible measurements that allow meaningful comparisons between different hardware configurations, kernel versions, or tuning parameters.
The tool includes built-in test types for common benchmarks. CPU tests stress processors using prime number calculations to measure computational throughput. Memory tests measure bandwidth and latency across sequential and random access patterns. File I/O tests support multiple modes including sequential writes, sequential reads, and random read/write mixes, requiring a preparation step to create test files before running and a cleanup step afterward.
Database benchmarks simulate OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) workloads against MySQL or PostgreSQL, executing realistic mixes of select, insert, update, and delete queries. All test types support multi-threaded execution to measure how performance scales with parallelism, revealing bottlenecks and contention points. Custom Lua scripts can define additional workloads beyond the built-in tests.

cpu

CPU test.

Memory test.

File I/O test.

Database OLTP test.

Read-only database test.

Number of threads.

Test duration.

Max events.

Total file size.

I/O mode (seqwr, seqrd, rndrw, etc.).

MySQL host.

MySQL user.

MySQL password.

Prepare test.

Run test.

Clean up.

Results depend on test parameters. Synthetic benchmarks don't reflect all workloads. File tests need disk space. Database tests need setup.

sysbench was created by Alexey Kopytov at MySQL AB around 2004. It became a standard tool for MySQL benchmarking and general system performance testing.

fio(1), stress-ng(1), pgbench(1), iperf(1)