Re: Rookie - Performance Tests

Brickley Jeff-RA9607 <Jeff(dot)Brickley(at)motorola(dot)com> writes:
> I noticed there is a directory with some scripts for performance
> tests. I did not however see any readme or any documentation that
> describes how to use the scripts and what exactly they test for. Can
> anyone point me in the right direction? I have run a few of my own
> perf tests but would like to use the ones shipped with the release.

I wouldn't put much credence in src/test/performance/, if that's what
you're speaking of. AFAICT from the CVS logs, Vadim put those in as
a quick and dirty test set nearly five years ago, and no one has touched
them (or, likely, even bothered to run them) since then.

src/test/bench/ has a better pedigree, being the old Wisconsin DB
benchmark, but it's still pretty long in the tooth and unmaintained.
(It'd be nice if someone would at least fix it to run against a normal
postmaster, instead of using a standalone backend; that's a completely
unrealistic, uninteresting test scenario...)

What people actually seem to use these days is contrib/pgbench/ or
the OSDB benchmark (see http://osdb.sourceforge.net/). pgbench has
a well-earned reputation for producing irreproducible results :-(.
OSDB is relatively new on the scene but may be the up-and-coming standard.

In the end, your own application is the only performance test that
counts ...

regards, tom lane