Hi All, I'm sure by now most of you will have read at least some parts of this guide:
http://guide.couchdb.org/draft/performance.html I was reading it the other day and noticed the "Call to Arms" section at the bottom of the page. I don't know if there are already any benchmarking tools out there, but I decided to try writing one. Hopefully the one I have written will be useful. About my background, for my day job i am a performance tester, usually specialising in Loadrunner, so this project was something to keep my mind occupied while waiting for my test system to be rebuilt. Given this I have only spent a few hours on it and so there is probably still room for improvement, this email is about finding out if there is interest or if this will be useful to the CouchDB community, so really should I continue developing this tool, or am I wasting my time? In designing this benchmarking utility I reflected on all the systems I have tested and tried to come up with some common areas where database systems suffer in performance. Then bearing in mind the fundamental differences between traditional databases and NoSQL databases (particularly CouchDB) I tried to construct some some common database usage scenarios. The 3 scenarios I came up with are: 1. Write heavy (each user performs 12 writes, 6 reads and 3 searches / index queries) 2. Index / Query / Search heavy (each user performs 1 write, 2 reads and 6 searches / index queries) 3. Read Heavy (each user performs 1 writes, 10 reads and 3 searches / index queries) I have tried out my benchmarking tool on a couple of machines so far, in these tests I managed to cause CouchDB to encounter the following situations: 1. Performance degradation due to being Disk IO bound 2. Performance degradation due to being Memory bound 3. Performance degradation due to being CPU bound 4. Couch DB crashed 5. Benchmarking completed successfully and produce a performance score Based on these results I believe I have created an effective tool for benchmarking, so I decided the best next step was to release the tool as an open source project, so I created a github project which can be found here: https://github.com/damies13/kvbench. Here you will the readme file describes the 3 scenarios in more detail, the benchmark definition or design and also the pre benchmark data priming. You will also find here the python script that is the benchmarking tool and some instructions for setting up a couch db database for the benchmarking process. As this is getting long i'll wrap up by noting that I deliberately did not use the python couchdb libraries but instead I used the requests library (standard http) and json library because I wanted to keep the code as generic as possible, the intention is that this benchmarking tool should be able to be used to benchmarking any key / value store, whether that be a document based NoSQL, and Key Value based NoSQL database or some other Rest API / engine (e.g. backed by a traditional database). I look forward to some feed back, hopefully I have created something useful. Sincerely, Dave.
