Re: Benchmarking

Sathish Balas <sathishudercor_at_home.com> wrote:
>What steps would you take to do a very simple benchmark of an Oracle Server
>?
>Any tips , ideas ............

Quick answer is install Oracle, install your application. Hit "go" and see how fast it is.

The long answer is:

Determine what you're measuring, this depends on the application you're testing. There may be a simple useful metric such as "orders processed per second with latency of < 2 seconds". Or it may be more complicated than that. Decide how you're going to measure this.

During the benchmark you may well find ways to change the application to improve its performance dramatically. This is especially true if the application hasn't previously been run to the rates you are testing. The first benchmark of a new application is often more like a system test than a performance measurement. Decide how much application tuning you can afford to do,

On the overall subject of database application and server tuning, go and read the "Oracle8i Designing and Tuning for Performance" manual.

Determine what an acceptable performance level is. You can spend forever tuning and getting microscopic improvements, at some point you've got to say "enough" and do the golden run that you'll report as the result of the benchmark. Decide how much you can change and reconfigure the hardware during the benchmark, how much time you can spend reconfiguring Oracle and the OS.

Document everything - you'll want to be able to reproduce your results at the next benchmark, or on a customer's site, or when your "tuning" halves the performance of your application. I find it's a great help having scripts that record as much as possible of the tedious detail automatically.

-- 
Andrew Mobbs - http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~andrewm/