SysBench is a system performance benchmark that is available on sourceforge.net.  You can download it from sysbench.sourceforge.net and currently on version 0.4.12.  It is currently not in the OpenSuSE nor SuSE software repository and you will have to download the sources and build it.

The main objective of SysBench was for evaluating the Operating System’s parameters that are considered important for a system that is running a database.  It is designed to be modular, cross platform and is a multi-threaded application.  The benchmarks includes:

• File I/O performance
• Operating Systems scheduler performance
• Memory allocation and transfer speed
• POSIX threads implementation performance
• Database server performance (OLTP benchmark)

It comes well documented for the installation but on debian based systems (and OpenSuSE), you will need to edit a parameter in configure.ac  the  file.  I am really not sure why they don’t just have an automatic detection of the OS distribution and select the right parameters.  Anyway, after you download it, you can untar it using tar –xvzf sysbench-0.4.12.tar.gz. Then follow the instructions below;

1. Edit configure.ac and replace the LIBTOOL with RANLIB
2. Run ./autogen.sh
3. Run ./configure –without-mysql (This is because my machine doesn’t have MySQL installed)
4. Run make
5. Run sudo make install

There, you are done!