Harmful Workload Generator for PostgreSQL

github.com

135 points·tirumaraiselvan··7 comments

Some of my own code did all of this all by itself...

Awesome tool! It's like Chaos Monkey for your ACID database. I am kind of hoping it could steer conversation into making DBs more "idiot proof". Pushing some code (or making a "manual data fix") that in rare conditions inadvertently locks the production database is no fun.

Interesting. How does this compare to just generating generic system load (e.g. running some benchmark)?

Well, this tool is extremely useful when you want, for example, to test your monitoring system or other observability tools to understand how "bad" cases will be really visible in them.

Of course, it should not be used in production.

Also, it's a good idea to use it for training of DBA / DBRE / SRE engineers to practice various cases and improve their diagnostics skills.

Regular benchmarks could have something like this embedded, I think. Postgres standard tool, pgbench, doesn't have it now. But I doubt "harmful workload" would be really useful when we test systems to see their max throughput / lowest latencies for particular workload.

starred, Im curious if it could run concurrently with a standard tool to see impact on performances.

Cool tool to test implementation of graceful degradation in the service and between services

Great idea! Do you think such kinds of tests could be fully automated (executed in CI)?

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