benchmark

[beginner]

what's the most popular tool to do oracle benchmark?

[marist89]

I think the best way to benchmark any system is to setup your application and run a set of pre-defined functionality. If the application has not been developed yet, I run a reasonable simulation that approximates the application's behaviour.

The TPC has several standard benchmarks available. http://www.tpc.org

[svk]

Jeff is right. Best way to evaluate the h/w (or s/w) is to write your own benchmark suite.

It always happens that unless you really do some grilling research of the standard available TPC(A/B/C) benchmark results, you may not find what you need for your application. It is a fairly complex job to understand these standard results for an application that is purely CPU intensive. Or may be I/O intensive. Every application will certainly have its own flavour.

Understand one thing : these days every h/w is comparable to each other. Comparing a HP server with a Sun server in the same range is as good as comparing Accord to Camry. The vendors always present the TPC benchmarks in a manner that is favourable to their piece of h/w. And most of the times it is correst as well. What is important is WHAT YOU NEED !!

[Zaggy]

I like to use a mixture of OEM and OS tools to get the job done, like:
1. OEM Performance Manager
2. top
3. "iostat -xnc 3" or "iostat -xnc -td 3" for Solaris 2.8
4. vmstat 3

I dump the iostat output to a file and load it into something like MS Excel and graph and manipulate the data.


If the app already exists, I would get some loaner equipment for testing from your primary vendors. Then test to your hearts content, that is what I did with some Sun loaner equipment. That also helped me find the sweet spot for our application.