Test MySQL on AWS quickly

Using sysbench to performance test AWS RDS MySQL hardware is an easy three step operation.
Sysbench creates synthetic tests and they are done on a 1 mil row 'sbtest' table that sysbench creates in the MySQL database you indicate. The test doesn't intrude with your database schema, and it doesn't use your data, so it is quite safe. The test is an OLTP test trying to simulate event operations in the database as it runs various, SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE requests on it's own 'sbtest' table.

The results of the tests are metrics like transactions per second, number of events, elapsed time etc. See man pages for description and Google it, it is a popular testing tool. Other things you can set it up to do are to control how many requests (events) you want it to execute in a given time or you can tell it to keep on executing infinite requests until you stop it, or destruction testing. Is a very flexible testing tool with many options including throtling concurrency.

You can be up and running with 3 commands on a unix system as follows. 

 
Download sysbench tool (doing this on ubuntu)

sudo apt-get install sysbench

Create a table with 1 mil rows

sysbench --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-host={your rds host url} --db-driver=mysql --mysql-user={your rds root user} --mysql-password={password} --mysql-db={your mysql database name} prepare

Test with different parameters

sysbench --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-host={your rds host url} --db-driver=mysql --mysql-user={your rds root user} --mysql-password={password} --mysql-db={your mysql database name} --max-time=60 --num-threads=550 run

Warning: Synthetic tests will just give you the ability of the hardware at a given standard set of requests and DML operations. There are no way an indication of what will happen to your database if the real workload increases beacause of the applications. Application Load Testing is something else, applications are complex! Database Workload is dependent on the application generated workload from real users using the system and is very hard to simulate that in a test. It is not imppossible If you use a database, such as Oracle which has the capability of recording and replaying its production database workload - called Automatic Workload Repository (AWR). In MySQL I couldn't find so far a way to do this. But sysbench synthetic tests gave me the ability to quickly benchmark and baseline a MySQL database capabilities on different AWS Amazon hardware, something is better than nothing I suppose.