TopGit tracks akopytov/sysbench on GitHub as part of the Data family. The project has 6.8k stars. Scriptable database and system performance benchmark
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sysbench is a scriptable multi-threaded benchmark tool based on
LuaJIT. It is most frequently used for database benchmarks, but can also
be used to create arbitrarily complex workloads that do not involve a
database server.
sysbench comes with the following bundled benchmarks:
oltp_*.lua: a collection of OLTP-like database benchmarks
fileio: a filesystem-level benchmark
cpu: a simple CPU benchmark
memory: a memory access benchmark
threads: a thread-based scheduler benchmark
mutex: a POSIX mutex benchmark
Features
extensive statistics about rate and latency is available, including
latency percentiles and histograms;
low overhead even with thousands of concurrent threads. sysbench is
capable of generating and tracking hundreds of millions of events per
second;
new benchmarks can be easily created by implementing pre-defined hooks
in user-provided Lua scripts;
can be used as a general-purpose Lua interpreter as well, simply
replace #!/usr/bin/lua with #!/usr/bin/sysbench in your script.
Installing from Binary Packages
Linux
The easiest way to download and install sysbench on Linux is using
binary package repositories hosted by
packagecloud. The repositories are
automatically updated on each sysbench release. Currently x86_64, i386
and aarch64 binaries are available.
Multiple methods to download and install sysbench packages are available and
described at https://packagecloud.io/akopytov/sysbench/install.
On macOS, up-to-date sysbench packages are available from Homebrew:
# Add --with-postgresql if you need PostgreSQL support
brew install sysbench
Windows
As of sysbench 1.0 support for native Windows builds was dropped. It may
be re-introduced in later releases. Currently, the recommended way to
obtain sysbench on Windows is
using
Windows Subsystem for Linux available in Windows 10.
After installing WSL and getting into he bash prompt on Windows
following Debian/Ubuntu installation instructions is
sufficient. Alternatively, one can use WSL to build and install sysbench
from source, or use an older sysbench release to build a native binary.
Building and Installing From Source
It is recommended to install sysbench from the official binary
packages as described in
Installing from Binary Packages. Below
are instruction for cases when you want to use sysbench on an
architecture for which no binary packages are available.
Build Requirements
Windows
As of sysbench 1.0 support for native Windows builds was
dropped. It may be re-introduced in later versions. Currently, the
recommended way to build sysbench on Windows is using
Windows Subsystem for Linux available in Windows 10.
After installing WSL and getting into bash prompt on Windows, following
Debian/Ubuntu build instructions is sufficient. Alternatively, one can
build and use an older 0.5 release on Windows.
Debian/Ubuntu
apt -y install make automake libtool pkg-config libaio-dev
# For MySQL support
apt -y install libmysqlclient-dev libssl-dev
# For PostgreSQL support
apt -y install libpq-dev
RHEL/CentOS
yum -y install make automake libtool pkgconfig libaio-devel
# For MySQL support, replace with mysql-devel on RHEL/CentOS 5
yum -y install mariadb-devel openssl-devel
# For PostgreSQL support
yum -y install postgresql-devel
Fedora
dnf -y install make automake libtool pkgconfig libaio-devel
# For MySQL support
dnf -y install mariadb-devel openssl-devel
# For PostgreSQL support
dnf -y install postgresql-devel
macOS
Assuming you have Xcode (or Xcode Command Line Tools) and Homebrew installed:
brew install automake libtool openssl pkg-config
# For MySQL support
brew install mysql
# For PostgreSQL support
brew install postgresql
# openssl is not linked by Homebrew, this is to avoid "ld: library not found for -lssl"
export LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/opt/openssl/lib
Build and Install
./autogen.sh
# Add --with-pgsql to build with PostgreSQL support
./configure
make -j
make install
The above will build sysbench with MySQL support by default. If you have
MySQL headers and libraries in non-standard locations (and no
mysql_config can be found in the PATH), you can specify them
explicitly with --with-mysql-includes and --with-mysql-libs options
to ./configure.
To compile sysbench without MySQL support, use --without-mysql. If no
database drivers are available database-related scripts will not work,
but other benchmarks will be functional.
Usage
General Syntax
The general command line syntax for sysbench is:
sysbench [options]... [testname] [command]
testname is an optional name of a built-in test (e.g. fileio,
memory, cpu, etc.), or a name of one of the bundled Lua scripts
(e.g. oltp_read_only), or a path to a custom Lua script. If no
test name is specified on the command line (and thus, there is no
command too, as in that case it would be parsed as a testname), or
the test name is a dash ("-"), then sysbench expects a Lua script to
execute on its standard input.
command is an optional argument that will be passed by sysbench to
the built-in test or script specified with testname. command
defines the action that must be performed by the test. The list of
available commands depends on a particular test. Some tests also
implement their own custom commands.
Below is a description of typical test commands and their purpose:
prepare: performs preparative actions for those tests which need
them, e.g. creating the necessary files on disk for the fileio
test, or filling the test database for database benchmarks.
run: runs the actual test specified with the testname
argument. This command is provided by all tests.
cleanup: removes temporary data after the test run in those
tests which create one.
help: displays usage information for the test specified with the
testname argument. This includes the full list of commands
provided by the test, so it should be used to get the available
commands.
options is a list of zero or more command line options starting with
'--'. As with commands, the sysbench testname help command
should be used to describe available options provided by a
particular test.
See General command line options
for a description of general options provided by sysbench itself.
You can use sysbench --help to display the general command line syntax
and options.
General Command Line Options
The table below lists the supported common options, their descriptions and default values:
Option
Description
Default value
--threads
The total number of worker threads to create
1
--events
Limit for total number of requests. 0 (the default) means no limit
0
--time
Limit for total execution time in seconds. 0 means no limit
10
--warmup-time
Execute events for this many seconds with statistics disabled before the actual benchmark run with statistics enabled. This is useful when you want to exclude the initial period of a benchmark run from statistics. In many benchmarks, the initial period is not representative because CPU/database/page and other caches need some time to warm up
0
--rate
Average transactions rate. The number specifies how many events (transactions) per seconds should be executed by all threads on average. 0 (default) means unlimited rate, i.e. events are executed as fast as possible
0
--thread-init-timeout
Wait time in seconds for worker threads to initialize
30
--thread-stack-size
Size of stack for each thread
32K
--report-interval
Periodically report intermediate statistics with a specified interval in seconds. Note that statistics produced by this option is per-interval rather than cumulative. 0 disables intermediate reports
0
--debug
Print more debug info
off
--validate
Perform validation of test results where possible
off
--help
Print help on general syntax or on a specified test, and exit
off
--verbosity
Verbosity level (0 - only critical messages, 5 - debug)
4
--percentile
sysbench measures execution times for all processed requests to display statistical information like minimal, average and maximum execution time. For most benchmarks it is also useful to know a request execution time value matching some percentile (e.g. 95% percentile means we should drop 5% of the most long requests and choose the maximal value from the remaining ones). This option allows to specify a percentile rank of query execution times to count
95
--luajit-cmd
perform a LuaJIT control command. This option is equivalent to luajit -j. See LuaJIT documentation for more information
Note that numerical values for all size options (like --thread-stack-size in this table) may be specified by appending the corresponding multiplicative suffix (K for kilobytes, M for megabytes, G for gigabytes and T for terabytes).
Random Numbers Options
sysbench provides a number of algorithms to generate random numbers that are distributed according to a given probability distribution. The table below lists options that can be used to control those algorithms.
Option
Description
Default value
--rand-type
random numbers distribution {uniform, gaussian, special, pareto, zipfian} to use by default. Benchmark scripts may choose to use either the default distribution, or specify it explictly, i.e. override the default.
special
--rand-seed
seed for random number generator. When 0, the current time is used as an RNG seed.
0
--rand-spec-iter
number of iterations for the special distribution
12
--rand-spec-pct
percentage of the entire range where 'special' values will fall in the special distribution
1
--rand-spec-res
percentage of 'special' values to use for the special distribution
75
--rand-pareto-h
shape parameter for the Pareto distribution
0.2
--rand-zipfian-exp
shape parameter (theta) for the Zipfian distribution
0.8
Versioning
For transparency and insight into its release cycle, and for striving to maintain backward compatibility, sysbench will be maintained under the Semantic Versioning guidelines as much as possible.
Releases will be numbered with the following format:
<major>.<minor>.<patch>
And constructed with the following guidelines:
Breaking backward compatibility bumps the major (and resets the minor and patch)
New additions without breaking backward compatibility bumps the minor (and resets the patch)
Bug fixes and misc changes bumps the patch
For more information on SemVer, please visit http://semver.org/.
The most recent commit recorded on akopytov/sysbench was 1.7 years ago, based on the GitHub push timestamp. The repository has 1.1k forks — one of the better signals of community interest.
How many stars does akopytov/sysbench have?
akopytov/sysbench has 6.8k GitHub stars — refresh the page for the live number, or check github.com/akopytov/sysbench. TopGit mirrors GitHub's count but does not claim minute-by-minute accuracy.
Is akopytov/sysbench open source?
Yes — akopytov/sysbench ships under the GPL-2.0 license, which makes its source code freely readable (and, depending on license terms, forkable and reusable). Source: github.com/akopytov/sysbench.
What else is in the Data space?
akopytov/sysbench is tracked by TopGit under the Data category, alongside 12 GitHub-tagged topics. Trending and Topics pages list peer repositories of comparable stars and language.
What is akopytov/sysbench?
akopytov/sysbench (akopytov/sysbench) is a C project on GitHub. From the project's own README: Scriptable database and system performance benchmark
What language is akopytov/sysbench written in?
akopytov/sysbench is written primarily in C. GitHub's language field is based on the largest share of bytes in the default branch.
What license does akopytov/sysbench use?
akopytov/sysbench is released under the GPL-2.0 license. Always verify the LICENSE file directly on GitHub for the authoritative terms — license strings can be edited out of sync with a project's actual stance.
Where do I read more about akopytov/sysbench?
This TopGit page is a snapshot — the READ ME tab shows the project's own README content (links stripped, images preserved). The GitHub repository at github.com/akopytov/sysbench is the definitive source.
Read full README in the tab above.
Is sysbench worth your time?
ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can all read this page. Ask one of them what it makes of sysbench.
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