benchmarking.md

Run benchmarking yourself

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Guide

pragmaticDB includes a built-in benchmark client (tools/bench.cpp) that connects to a live server and measures insert throughput, full-table scan speed, and commit (fsync) latency. This is particularly useful for measuring the real-world impact of the LRU-K Buffer Pool vs direct durable writes.

First, ensure the pragmaticDB server is running in a terminal:

make run

In a second terminal, build and run the benchmark suite:

make bench
./bench [host] [port] [number_of_inserts]

# Defaults to:
./bench 127.0.0.1 8080 1000

Metrices

Metric	What it shows
In-memory INSERT	Raw throughput of the buffer pool + slotted page writes. High ops/sec because it writes to RAM.
Durable INSERT	Cost of COMMIT (fsync) after every single write. Shows worst-case persistence overhead.
Speedup ratio	The ratio of in-memory speed vs durable speed. Proves the buffer pool is doing real work (typically 10–50x speedup).
SELECT * scan	Full table scan throughput across all inserted rows.
COMMIT latency	Time taken to flush N dirty pages from RAM to disk atomically.

(benchmarking results, macbook air m4)

Example

(benchmarking results, macbook air m4)