dbench

DBENCH(1)                   General Commands Manual                  DBENCH(1)

NAME
       dbench - Measure disk throughput for simulated netbench run

SYNOPSIS
       dbench [options]numclients
       tbench [options]numclientsserver tbench_srv [options]

DESCRIPTION
       This  manual  page  documents briefly the dbench and tbench benchmarks.
       This manual page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution  be-
       cause  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 net-
       bench 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 net-
       bench 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.

OPTIONS
       The  dbench  program  takes  a  number,  which  indicates the number of
       clients to run simultaneously.  It can also take the following options:

       -c client.txt
              Use this as the full path name of the client.txt file  (the  de-
              fault is /usr/share/dbench/client.txt).

       -s     Use synchronous file IO on all file operations.

       -t TIME
              set the runtime of the benchmark in seconds (default 600)

       -D DIR set the base directory to run the filesystem operations in

       -x     enable  xattr  support,  simulating  the xattr operations Samba4
              would need to perform to run the load

       -S     Use synchronous IO for all directory operations (unlink,  rmdir,
              mkdir and rename).
              The tbench program takes a number, which indicates the number of
              clients to run simultaneously, and  a  server  name:  tbench_srv
              should be invoked on that server before invoking tbench.  tbench
              can also take the following options:

       -T option[,...]
              This sets the socket options for the connection to  the  server.
              The  options  are  a  comma-separated list of one or more of the
              following: SO_KEEPALIVE, SO_REUSEADDR, SO_BROADCAST, SO_NODELAY,
              SO_LOWDELAY,  SO_THROUGHPUT, SO_SNDBUF=number, SO_RCVBUF=number,
              SO_SNDLOWAT=number,  SO_RCVLOWAT=number,  SO_SNDTIMEO=number,and
              SO_RCVTIMEO=number.   See  socket(7) for details about these op-
              tions.
              The tbench_srv can only take one  option:  -T  option[,...]   as
              documented above.

SEE ALSO
       /usr/share/doc/dbench/README  contains  the  original  README by Andrew
       Tridgell which accompanies the dbench source.

AUTHOR
       This  manual  page  was  originally  written  by  Paul  Russell  <prus-
       sell@alderaan.franken.de>,  for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be
       used by others). Modified  and  updated  by  Mattias  Nordstrom  <nord-
       strom@realnode.com>.

                                 June 18, 2005                       DBENCH(1)