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)

Primarily written for MySQL server benchmarking, SysBench will be
further extended to support multiple database backends, distributed
benchmarks and third-party plug-in modules.

WWW: http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/