Lab 2

Lab 2, Benchmarking Mysql

For lab 2 we had to benchmark a software package. We chose MySql and found the link here and under the selected platform just choose Source Code. We were using a 64 bit x86 machine running fedora 21 and there was not a version for fedora so we just chose generic Linux option which is at the very bottom. We copied that link and used the wget command to install it via command line. Once we Un-tarred it  (tar -xvf [filename]) we started looking for the configure script but it did not have one, it used cmake, not configure. So we installed cmake on the server and ran it and it gave us a makefile. We ran make without the useful -j option which allows it to take advantage of multiple cores, so that delayed us, we ending up waiting for a long time. Once it was made we needed to benchmark it, eventually we found out how to use the benchmark suite through this tutorial. We were running low on time in class so we stopped it after the first test but it gave us this results file:

 per operation:
Operation                           seconds          usr       sys     cpu   tests
alter_table_add                      100.00    0.02    0.00    0.02     100
alter_table_drop                     101.00    0.01    0.00    0.01      91
create_index                           2.00        0.00    0.00    0.00       8
create_table                            11.00      0.00    0.00    0.00      28
drop_index                             2.00        0.00    0.00    0.00       8
drop_table                              14.00      0.00    0.00    0.00      28
insert                                       340.00    0.37    0.20    0.57    9768
select_distinct                          2.00        0.19    0.00    0.19     800
select_group                           1.00         0.24    0.02    0.26    2800
select_join                               0.00        0.06    0.00    0.06     100
select_key_prefix_join             1.00        0.34    0.00    0.34     100
select_simple_join                    1.00        0.08    0.00    0.08     500
TOTALS                               575.00     1.31    0.22    1.53   14331 

I'm not quite sure if I understand this table, particularly why there is so many seconds but there was so little time taken on usr or sys side. My theory is that the usr and sys and cpu columns are the percent of cpu it was using at the time, but I could be wrong.

I think this lab was quite useful, we learned how to use cmake  and how to speed up the make process with -j and we did get results, and although I might not understand them yet, they're still results!

Thanks for reading.