Product tutorials, how-tos, and fully-documented APIs.

Basho Bench

    Basho Bench is a benchmarking tool created to conduct accurate and repeatable performance tests and stress tests, and produce performance graphs.

    Originally developed by Dave Smith (Dizzy) to benchmark Riak, Basho's key/value datastore, it exposes a pluggable driver interface and has been extended to serve as a benchmarking tool against a variety of projects. New drivers can be written in Erlang and are generally less than 200 lines of code.

    Download

    The main repository for basho_bench is http://github.com/basho/basho_bench/.

    Documentation

    Note on Documentation

    This topic replaces the documentation that was in the basho_bench repository under docs/Documentation.org prior to February 2011.

    How does it work?

    When Basho Bench starts (basho_bench.erl), it reads the configuration (basho_bench_config.erl), creates a new results directory, then sets up the test. (basho_bench_app.erl/basho_bench_sup.erl)

    During test setup, Basho Bench creates:

    Once these processes have been created and initialized, Basho Bench sends a run command to all worker processes, causing them to begin the test. Each worker is initialized with a common seed value for random number generation to ensure that the generated workload is reproducible at a later date.

    During the test, the workers repeatedly call driver:run/4, passing in the next operation to run, a keygen function, a valuegen function, and the last state of the driver. The worker process times the operation, and reports this to the stats process when the operation has completed.

    Finally, once the test has been run for the duration specified in the config file, all workers and stats processes are terminated and the benchmark ends. The measured latency and throughput of the test can be found in ./tests/current/. Previous results are in timestamped directories of the form ./tests/YYYYMMDD-HHMMSS/.

    Installation

    Prerequisites

    Building from Source

    Basho Bench is currently available as source code only. To get the latest code, clone the basho_bench repository:

    git clone git://github.com/basho/basho_bench.git
cd basho_bench
make

    Usage

    Run basho_bench:

    ./basho_bench myconfig.config

    This will generate results in tests/current/. You will need to create a configuration file. The recommended approach is to start from a file in the examples directory and modify settings using the Configuration section below for reference.

    Generating Benchmark Graphs

    The output of basho_bench can be used to create graphs showing:

    Prerequisites

    The R statistics language is needed to generate graphs. Note: If necessary, R can be installed on a different machine than the one running basho_bench, and the performance data can be copied (via rsync, for example) from the load testing machine to the one that will be generating and viewing the graphs (such as a desktop).

    Follow the instructions for your platform to install R.

    Generating Graphs

    To generate a benchmark graph against the current results, run:

    make results

    This will create a results file in tests/current/summary.png.

    You can also run this manually:

    priv/summary.r -i tests/current

    Configuration

    Basho Bench ships with a number of sample configuration files, available in the /examples/ directory.

    Global Config Settings

    mode

    The mode setting controls the rate at which workers invoke the {driver:run/4} function with a new operation. There are two possible values:

    Note that this setting is applied to each driver independently. For example, if {rate, 5} is used with 3 concurrent workers, basho_bench will be generating 15 (i.e. 5 * 3) operations per second.

    % Run at max, ie: as quickly as possible
{mode, max}

% Run 15 operations per second per worker
{mode, {rate, 15}}

    concurrent

    The number of concurrent worker processes. The default is 3 worker processes. This determines the number of concurrent clients running requests on API under test.

    % Run 10 concurrent processes
{concurrent, 10}

    duration

    The duration of the test, in minutes. The default is 5 minutes.

    % Run the test for one hour
{duration, 60}

    operations

    The possible operations that the driver will run, plus their “weight” or likelihood of being run. Default is [{get,4},{put,4},{delete, 1}] which means that out of every 9 operations, 'get' will be called four times, 'put' will called four times, and 'delete' will be called once, on average.

    % Run 80% gets, 20% puts
{operations, [{get, 4}, {put, 1}]}.

    Operations are defined on a per-driver basis. Not all drivers will implement the “get”/“put” operations discussed above. Consult the driver source to determine the valid operations. E.g., if you're testing the HTTP interface, the corresponding operations are “get” and “update” respectively.

    If a driver does not support a specified operation (“asdfput” in this example) you may see errors like:

    DEBUG:Driver basho_bench_driver_null crashed: {function_clause,
                                          [},
                                           {{{basho_bench_worker,
                                            worker_next_op,1}}},
                                           {{{basho_bench_worker,
                                            max_worker_run_loop,1}}}]}

    driver

    The module name of the driver that basho_bench will use to generate load. A driver may simply invoke code in-process (such as when measuring the performance of DETS) or may open network connections and generate load on a remote system (such as when testing a Riak server/cluster).

    Available drivers include:

    On invocation of the driver:run/4 method, the driver may return one of the following results:

    code_paths

    Some drivers need additional Erlang code in order to run. Specify the paths to this code using the code_paths configuration setting.

    key_generator

    The generator function to use for creating keys. Generators are defined in basho_bench_keygen.erl. Available generators include:

    The default key generator is {uniform_int, 100000}.

    Examples:

    % Use a randomly selected integer between 1 and 10,000
{key_generator, {uniform_int, 10000}}.

% Use a randomly selected integer between 1 and 10,000, as binary.
{key_generator, {int_to_bin, {uniform_int, 10000}}}.

% Use a pareto distributed integer between 1 and 10,000; values < 2000
% will be returned 80% of the time.
{key_generator, {pareto_int, 10000}}.

    value_generator

    The generator function to use for creating values. Generators are defined in basho_bench_valgen.erl. Available generators include:

    The default value generator is {value_generator, {fixed_bin, 100}}.

    Examples:

    % Generate a fixed size random binary of 512 bytes
{value_generator, {fixed_bin, 512}}.

% Generate a random binary whose size is exponentially distributed
% starting at 1000 bytes and a mean of 2000 bytes
{value_generator, {exponential_bin, 1000, 2000}}.

    rng_seed

    The initial random seed to use. This is explicitly seeded, rather than seeded from the current time, so that a test can be run in a predictable, repeatable fashion.

    Default is {rng_seed, {42, 23, 12}}.

    % Seed to {12, 34, 56}
{rng_seed, {12, 34, 56}.

    log_level

    The log_level setting determines which messages Basho Bench will log to the console and to disk.

    Default level is debug.

    Valid levels are:

    report_interval

    How often, in seconds, should the stats process write histogram data to disk. Default is 10 seconds.

    test_dir

    The directory in which to write result data. The default is tests/.

    basho_bench_driver_riakclient Settings

    These configuration settings apply to the basho_bench_driver_riakclient driver.

    riakclient_nodes

    List of Riak nodes to use for testing.

    {riakclient_nodes, ['[riak1@127.0.0.1](mailto:riak1@127.0.0.1)',
'[riak2@127.0.0.1](mailto:riak2@127.0.0.1)']}.

    riakclient_cookie

    The Erlang cookie to use to connect to Riak clients. Default is 'riak'.

    {riakclient_cookie, riak}.

    riakclient_mynode

    The name of the local node. This is passed into net_kernel:start/1.

    {riakclient_mynode,
['[basho_bench@127.0.0.1](mailto:basho_bench@127.0.0.1)', longnames]}.

    riakclient_replies

    This value is used for R-values during a get operation, and W-values during a put operation.

    % Expect 1 reply.
{riakclient_replies, 1}.

    riakclient_bucket

    The Riak bucket to use for reading and writing values. Default is <<"test">>.

    % Use the "bench" bucket.
{riakclient_bucket, &lt;&lt;"bench"&gt;&gt;}.

    basho_bench_driver_riakc_pb Settings

    riakc_pb_ips

    List of IP addresses to connect the workers to. A random IP will be chosen for each worker.

    Default is {riakc_pb_ips, [{127,0,0,1}]}

    % Connect to a cluster of 3 machines
{riakc_pb_ips, [{10,0,0,1},{10,0,0,2},{10,0,0,3}]}

    riakc_pb_port

    The port on which to connect to the PBC interface.

    Default is {riakc_pb_port, 8087}

    riakc_pb_bucket

    The bucket to use for testing.

    Default is {riakc_pb_bucket, <<"test">>}

    basho_bench_driver_http_raw Settings

    http_raw_ips

    List of IP addresses to connect the workers to. Each worker makes requests to each IP in a round-robin fashion.

    Default is {http_raw_ips, ["127.0.0.1"]}

    % Connect to a cluster of machines in the 10.x network
{http_raw_ips, ["10.0.0.1", "10.0.0.2", "10.0.0.3"]}.

    http_raw_port

    Select the default port to connect on for the HTTP server.

    Default is {http_raw_port, 8098}.

    % Connect on port 8090
{http_raw_port, 8090}.

    http_raw_path

    Base path to use for accessing riak - usually “/riak/”

    Defaults is {http_raw_path, "/riak/test"}.

    % Place test data in another_bucket
{http_raw_path, "/riak/another_bucket"}.

    http_raw_params

    Additional parameters to add to the end of the URL. This can be used to set riak r/w/dw/rw parameters as as desired.

    Default is {http_raw_params, ""}.

    % Set R=1, W=1 for testing a system with n_val set to 1
{http_raw_params, "?r=1&w=1"}.

    http_raw_disconnect_frequency

    How often, in seconds or number of operations, the HTTP clients (workers) should forcibly disconnect from the server.

    Default is {http_raw_disconnect_frequency, infinity}. (never forcibly disconnect)

    % Disconnect after 60 seconds
{http_raw_disconnect_frequency, 60}.

% Disconnect after 200 operations
{http_raw_disconnect_frequency, {ops, 200}}.

    Custom Driver

    A custom driver must expose the following callbacks.

    % Create the worker
% ID is an integer
new(ID) -> {ok, State} or {error, Reason}.

% Run an operation
run(Op, KeyGen, ValueGen, State) -> {ok, NewState} or {error, Reason, NewState}.

    See the existing drivers for more details.