DBENCH(1)

💖 dbench(1) — General Commands Manual 💖

okay bestie, this is the dbench(1) page from the General Commands Manual, and we’re gonna make it make sense without losing a single crumb ✨

🌸 NAME 🌸

dbench — Measure disk throughput for simulated netbench run

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

copy this exactly, no vibe-based “fixing”:

dbench [options]numclients
tbench [options]numclientsserver tbench_srv [options]

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

This manual page documents briefly the dbench and tbench benchmarks. This page was written for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution because the original program does not have a manual page. However, it has fairly easy to read source code 👀

Netbench is a terrible benchmark, but it’s an “industry standard” and it’s what is used in the press to rate windows fileservers like Samba and WindowsNT. The original page literally drops this sentence: “Given the requirements of running netbench (60 and 150 Windows PCs all on switched fast ethernet and a really grunty server, and a to open up netbench to the masses.” iconic run-on, no notes 💀

Both dbench and tbench read a load description file called client.txt that was derived from a capture of a real netbench run. client.txt is about 25MB and describes the 500 thousand operations that a netbench client does in a typical netbench run. They parse client.txt and use it to produce the same load without having to buy a huge lab. slay 💅

dbench produces only the filesystem load. It does all the same IO calls that the smbd server in Samba would produce when confronted with a netbench run. It does no networking calls.

tbench produces only the TCP and process load. It does the same socket calls that smbd would do under a netbench load. It does no filesystem calls. The idea behind tbench is to eliminate smbd from the netbench test, as though the smbd code could be made infinately fast.

💅 OPTIONS 💅

The dbench program takes a number, which indicates the number of clients to run simultaneously. It can also take the following options:

• -c client.txt — Use this as the full path name of the client.txt file (the default is /usr/share/dbench/client.txt).
• -s — Use synchronous file IO on all file operations.
• -t TIME — set the runtime of the benchmark in seconds (default 600).
• -D DIR — set the base directory to run the filesystem operations in.
• -x — enable xattr support, simulating the xattr operations Samba4 would need to perform to run the load.
• -S — Use synchronous IO for all directory operations (unlink, rmdir, mkdir and rename).

The tbench program takes a number, which indicates the number of clients to run simultaneously, and a server name: tbench_srv should be invoked on that server before invoking tbench. tbench can also take the following options:

• -c loadfile — Use this as the full path name of the client.txt file (the default is /usr/share/dbench/client.txt).
• -T option[,...] — This sets the socket options for the connection to the server. The options are a comma-separated list of one or more of the following: SO_KEEPALIVE, SO_REUSEADDR, SO_BROADCAST, SO_NODELAY, SO_LOWDELAY, SO_THROUGHPUT, SO_SNDBUF=number, SO_RCVBUF=number, SO_SNDLOWAT=number, SO_RCVLOWAT=number, SO_SNDTIMEO=number, and SO_RCVTIMEO=number. See socket(7) for details about these options.

The tbench_srv can only take one option: -t option[,...] as documented above. yes, lowercase -t here, exactly as the page says 🫶

🎀 SEE ALSO 🎀

/usr/share/doc/dbench/README contains the original README by Andrew Tridgell which accompanies the dbench source.

👑 AUTHOR 👑

This manual page was written by Paul Russell <prussell@alderaan.franken.de>, for the Debian GNU/Linux system (but may be used by others).

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Page check complete: DBENCH(1), October 15, 2001, from the General Commands Manual — love u, bye 💖