DBENCH(1) | General Commands Manual | DBENCH(1) |
dbench - Measure disk throughput for simulated netbench run
dbench [options]numclients
tbench [options]numclientsserver tbench_srv
[options]
This manual page documents briefly the dbench and tbench benchmarks. This manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page. However, it has fairly easy to read source code.
Netbench is a terrible benchmark, but it's an "industry
standard" and it's what is used in the press to rate windows
fileservers like Samba and WindowsNT.
Given the requirements of running netbench (60 and 150 Windows PCs all on
switched fast ethernet and a really grunty server, and some way to nurse all
those machines along so they will run a very fussy benchmark suite without
crashing), these programs were written to open up netbench to the masses.
Both dbench and tbench read a load description file called
client.txt that was derived from a network sniffer dump of a real netbench
run. client.txt is about 4MB and describes the 90 thousand operations that a
netbench client does in a typical netbench run. They parse client.txt and
use it to produce the same load without having to buy a huge lab.
dbench produces only the filesystem load. It does all the same IO calls that
the smbd server in Samba would produce when confronted with a netbench run.
It does no networking calls.
tbench produces only the TCP and process load. It does the same socket calls
that smbd would do under a netbench load. It does no filesystem calls. The
idea behind tbench is to eliminate smbd from the netbench test, as though
the smbd code could be made infinately fast.
The dbench program takes a number, which indicates the number of clients to run simultaneously. It can also take the following options:
/usr/share/doc/dbench/README contains the original README by Andrew Tridgell which accompanies the dbench source.
This manual page was originally written by Paul Russell <prussell@alderaan.franken.de>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others). Modified and updated by Mattias Nordstrom <nordstrom@realnode.com>.
June 18, 2005 |