What You May Not Know About Random Number Generation in Sysbench

Sysbench is a well known and largely used tool to perform benchmarking. Originally written by Peter Zaitsev in early 2000, it has become a de facto standard when performing testing and benchmarking. Nowadays it is maintained by Alexey Kopytov and can be found in Github at https://github.com/akopytov/sysbench.

What I have noticed though, is that while widely-used, some aspects of sysbench are not really familiar to many. For instance, the easy way to expand/modify the MySQL tests is using the lua extension, or the embedded way it handles the random number generation. 

Why This Article? 

I wrote this article with the intent to show how easy it can be to customize sysbench to make it what you need. There are many different ways to extend sysbench use, and one of these is …

I frequently talk to our customer base about what keeps them up at night. While there is a large variance of answers, they tend to fall into one of two categories. The first is the conditioned fear of some monster lurking behind the scenes that could pounce at any time. The second, of course, is the actual monster of downtime on a critical system. Ask most tech folks and they will tell you outages seem to only happen late at night or early in the morning. And that they do keep them up.

Entire companies and product lines have been built around providing those in the IT world with some ability to sleep at night. Modern enterprises have spent millions to mitigate the risk and prevent their businesses from having a really bad day because of an outage. Cloud providers are attuned to the downtime dilemma and spend lots of time, money, and effort to build in redundancy and make “High Availability” (HA) as easy as possible. The frequency of …

At my latest webinar “MySQL Test Framework (MTR) for Troubleshooting”, I received an interesting question about MTR test cases for Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC). Particularly about testing SST and IST.

This post is intended to answer this question. It assumes you are familiar with MTR and can write tests for MySQL servers. If you are not, please watch the webinar recording first.

You can find example tests in any PXC tarball package. They are located in directories

mysql-test/suite/galera

 ,

mysql-test/suite/galera_3nodes

  and

mysql-test/suite/wsrep

 , though that last directory only contains a configuration file.

If you …

Please join Percona’s Principal Support Escalation Specialist, Sveta Smirnova, as she presents Troubleshooting MySQL Concurrency Issues with Load Testing Tools on Wednesday, May 23, 2018 at 11:00 AM PDT (UTC-7) / 2:00 PM EDT (UTC-4).

Register Now

Normally, we use benchmarking tools when we are developing applications. When applications are deployed, benchmarks tests are usually too late to help.

This webinar doesn’t cover actual benchmarks, but it does look at how you can use benchmarking tools for troubleshooting. When you need to repeat a situation caused by concurrent client execution, they can be your best …

Every day hundreds of millions of dollars are wasted by allowing improperly tuned or misconfigured systems, misunderstood infrastructure, and inefficient IT operations to live and thrive in data centers around the globe. There are both direct and indirect costs associated with allowing these unhealthy systems to continue to exist. Let’s look at some.

The setup:

Let us start by using a small example. We will start by looking at a small database setup. This setup will have a single master-slave, with a database size of lets say 500GB. Traffic is steady and let’s say this translates into 500 IOPS on the master. You have chosen to host this on Amazon’s AWS. A common way of ensuring backups occur in AWS is to setup ebs snapshots of the slave. In terms of usage, let us assume your CPU is about 50% used and you have about 20GB of hot data that needs to stay in the memory for the database.

If we look at what this …