Performance Benchmarking with TPC-C

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Warning:
CockroachDB v21.1 is no longer supported. For more details, see the Release Support Policy.

This page shows you how to reproduce CockroachDB's TPC-C performance benchmarking results on commodity AWS hardware. Across all scales, CockroachDB can process tpmC (new order transactions per minute) at near maximum efficiency. Start by choosing the scale you're interested in:

Workload Cluster size Warehouses Data size
Local 3 nodes on your laptop 10 2 GB
Small 3 nodes on c5d.4xlarge machines 2500 200 GB
Medium 15 nodes on c5d.4xlarge machines 13,000 1.04 TB
Large 81 nodes on c5d.9xlarge machines 140,000 11.2 TB

Before you begin

Step 1. Start CockroachDB

Warning:

The --insecure flag used in this tutorial is intended for non-production testing only. To run CockroachDB in production, use a secure cluster instead.

  1. Use the cockroach start command to start 3 nodes:

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    $ cockroach start \
    --insecure \
    --store=tpcc-local1 \
    --listen-addr=localhost:26257 \
    --http-addr=localhost:8080 \
    --join=localhost:26257,localhost:26258,localhost:26259 \
    --background
    
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    $ cockroach start \
    --insecure \
    --store=tpcc-local2 \
    --listen-addr=localhost:26258 \
    --http-addr=localhost:8081 \
    --join=localhost:26257,localhost:26258,localhost:26259 \
    --background
    
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    $ cockroach start \
    --insecure \
    --store=tpcc-local3 \
    --listen-addr=localhost:26259 \
    --http-addr=localhost:8082 \
    --join=localhost:26257,localhost:26258,localhost:26259 \
    --background
    
  2. Use the cockroach init command to perform a one-time initialization of the cluster:

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    $ cockroach init \
    --insecure \
    --host=localhost:26257
    

Step 2. Import the TPC-C dataset

CockroachDB comes with a number of built-in workloads for simulating client traffic. This step features CockroachDB's version of the TPC-C workload.

Use cockroach workload to load the initial schema and data:

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$ cockroach workload fixtures import tpcc \
--warehouses=10 \
'postgresql://root@localhost:26257?sslmode=disable'

This will load 2 GB of data for 10 "warehouses".

Step 3. Run the benchmark

Run the workload for ten "warehouses" of data for ten minutes:

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$ cockroach workload run tpcc \
--warehouses=10 \
--ramp=3m \
--duration=10m \
'postgresql://root@localhost:26257?sslmode=disable'

You'll see per-operation statistics every second:

Initializing 20 connections...
Initializing 100 workers and preparing statements...
_elapsed___errors__ops/sec(inst)___ops/sec(cum)__p50(ms)__p95(ms)__p99(ms)_pMax(ms)
    1.0s        0            0.0            0.0      0.0      0.0      0.0      0.0 delivery
    1.0s        0            0.0            0.0      0.0      0.0      0.0      0.0 newOrder
...
  105.0s        0            0.0            0.2      0.0      0.0      0.0      0.0 delivery
  105.0s        0            4.0            1.8     44.0     46.1     46.1     46.1 newOrder
  105.0s        0            0.0            0.2      0.0      0.0      0.0      0.0 orderStatus
  105.0s        0            1.0            2.0     14.7     14.7     14.7     14.7 payment
  105.0s        0            0.0            0.2      0.0      0.0      0.0      0.0 stockLevel
...
Tip:

For more tpcc options, use cockroach workload run tpcc --help. For details about other built-in load generators, use cockroach workload run --help.

Step 4. Interpret the results

Once the workload has finished running, you'll see a final output line:

_elapsed_______tpmC____efc__avg(ms)__p50(ms)__p90(ms)__p95(ms)__p99(ms)_pMax(ms)
  300.0s      121.6  94.6%     41.0     39.8     54.5     71.3     96.5    130.0

You will also see some audit checks and latency statistics for each individual query. For this run, some of those checks might indicate that they were SKIPPED due to insufficient data. For a more comprehensive test, run workload for a longer duration (e.g., two hours). The tpmC (new order transactions/minute) number is the headline number and efc ("efficiency") tells you how close CockroachDB gets to theoretical maximum tpmC.

The TPC-C specification has p90 latency requirements in the order of seconds, but as you see here, CockroachDB far surpasses that requirement with p90 latencies in the tens of milliseconds.

Step 5. Clean up

  1. When you're done with your test cluster, use the cockroach quit command to gracefully shut down each node.

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    $ cockroach quit --insecure --host=localhost:26257
    
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    $ cockroach quit --insecure --host=localhost:26258
    
    Note:

    For the last node, the shutdown process will take longer (about a minute each) and will eventually force the node to stop. This is because, with only 1 of 3 nodes left, all ranges no longer have a majority of replicas available, and so the cluster is no longer operational.

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    $ cockroach quit --insecure --host=localhost:26259
    
  2. To restart the cluster at a later time, run the same cockroach start commands as earlier from the directory containing the nodes' data stores.

    If you do not plan to restart the cluster, you may want to remove the nodes' data stores:

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    $ rm -rf tpcc-local1 tpcc-local2 tpcc-local3
    

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