Hitting Multiple Targets Like Bruce Lee with DVD Store 2.1

Bruce Lee was so fast that he could deliver punches and kicks to many bad guys at the same time.  As a matter of fact he would have been bored if he was only hitting one guy at a time.

DVD Store 2.1 now has a driver program that can deliver requests to multiple databases at the same time.  This allows for a single driver program to push load against multiple DVD Store databases that are running on different hosts.  The most common reason to this is needed was to be able to run load against a number of virtual machines all at the same time.  Prior to this new version, we ran load against multiple VMs by having multiple driver programs running.  This worked fine, but it required some scripting to synchronize starting and it also required some work after the run was over to get the total orders and average response time across all the VMs.

The new "Bruce Lee" enabled driver program runs against multiple databases and reports the stats on a per target basis as well as totals.  This makes it much easier to do tests against multiple DVD Store databases and get the summarized results.

The multiple targets are specified using the same parameter that was used for single targets, but you can now specify more than one by listing them with semicolons.  An example looks like this:

ds2oracledriver.exe --db_size=20GB --n_threads=4 --target=host1;host2;host3;host4

One interesting point is the number of threads that will be run is specified on a per target basis.  So in the above example 4 threads will be run against each host, resulting in 16 threads total.

The new DVD Store 2.1 has many new enhancements, including things like custom size databases, that I'm writing about in this series of blogs.  More to come in the following weeks.