Throughout this article we presented a variety of benchmarking utilities and monitoring tools, many but not all of which are MySQL-specific. The main guideline that you should follow each time you plan to benchmark is stated below.

First of all, create the test schema. Write the data generator and code the required scripts to accomplish this task. You may use already-existing entries to simulate a real-world scenario, or use a percentage of your entire database, or simply use randomly generated data as well. It’s up to you.

After the benchmarking source data is done, you need to grab the tools you are going to use. Research their usage, command line arguments and parameters, read their manuals and documentation, and learn how to use them. After this step, you should be able to execute the benchmarking tool(s) on the test data you have created.

Benchmarking is a critical part of optimizing and tuning, because it shows you a numerical representation of performance. But don’t forget the influencing factors we’ve covered in the first segment; always restart the server to eliminate caching artifacts, do more than a few iterative tests (5+), and then calculate the average. Usually, it is helpful to benchmark using an idle system rather than your active server. 

In the upcoming two parts we are going to cover query optimizations and other server tuning tips and strategies. By the end of this series, preparation (benchmarking) will meet opportunity (after each tweak applied, variable changed, etc.). That’s when you’ll get the most out of the things we have learned in these two articles.

As a closure, I’d like to invite you to join our experienced community of technology professionals on all areas of IT&C starting from software and hardware up to consumer electronics at Dev Hardware Forums. As well as, be sure to check out the community of our sister site at Dev Shed Forums. We are friendly and we’ll do our best to help you.