sysbench

SysBench is a modular, cross-platform and multi-threaded benchmark tool for evaluating OS parameters that are important for a system running a database under intensive load.

The idea of this benchmark suite is to quickly get an impression about system performance without setting up complex database benchmarks or even without installing a database at all.

Current features allow to test the following system parameters:

• file I/O performance
• scheduler performance
• memory allocation and transfer speed
• POSIX threads implementation performance
• database server performance (OLTP benchmark)

More information, and manual: http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/docs/