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memtier_benchmark: A High-Throughput Benchmarking Tool for Redis & Memcached

July 02, 2013
Redis
Redis Labs

Benchmarking is the practice of measuring the performance of a system to identify its limits. Benchmarking is an integral part of our service’s development process and we use it both for regression testing (verifying performance has not been reduced between releases) and also as an aid for optimizing database performance. It is generally considered good practice to measure the performance of your system periodically as well as after every change made to ensure it is achieving maximal performance and to potentially uncover relevant issues. To facilitate the execution of these benchmark runs, we developed our own benchmarking tool that we fondly call memtier_benchmark.

This tool can be used to generate various traffic patterns against both Memcached and Redis instances. It provides a robust set of customization and reporting capabilities all wrapped into a convenient and easy-to-use command-line interface. We use it extensively for all our benchmarking needs, both in development as well as to help share our knowledge with the broader community (for example, as we did in this blog post). We’ve released memtier_benchmark source code under the GPLv2 licensing scheme, and you can download it from our github account. The following are some highlights about the tool.

  • It supports both Redis and Memcached (binary and text) protocols so you can use it to test both and even compare their performance under different scenarios
  • memtier_benchmark is capable of launching multiple worker threads (using the -t option), with each thread driving a configurable number of clients (the -c option). Multiple threads enable you to better utilize the hardware resources of your benchmarking client and generate high traffic loads even using a single server.
  • When you instruct the tool to do multiple iterations of the benchmark run (the -x option), it will automatically produce reports for the best and worst runs as well as aggregated averages
  • You can control the ratio between GET and SET operations with the ratio option to measure performance when dealing with different access patterns
  • The tool offers control over the pattern of keys used by the GET and SET operations (key-pattern option). Each operation’s pattern can be set independently to be random or sequential.
  • Keys’ expiry can be common or randomly set from a configurable range (the expiry-range option)

For more information about these and other features of the tool, below is memtier_benchmark’s usage clause (printed with the help switch). Do feel free to give it a go and let us know what you think.

EDIT: check out the description of memtier_benchmark’s new version with pseudo-random data, Gaussian access pattern and range manipulation here