SysBench

SysBench is an open-source benchmarking program originally targeted for use on MySQL databases. It can also be used for a variety of low-level system tests, from CPU to disk I/O.

When running the more complicate OLTP tests included, it has been known to some issues with locking on PostgreSQL, but at least read-only it seems to work fine.

Suggested reading:

• Sysbench with PostgreSQL on Solaris
• Introducing FreeBSD 7.0: This OS was developed using SysBench as an OS and database agnostic test framework usable for comparing across many platform combinations.
• Running Sysbench 0.4.12 on Ubuntu 9.04: SysBench can be difficult to compile on some systems, this gives some suggestions for one popular combination.
• PostgreSQL History: Shows how various PostgreSQL versions improved over time using the SysBench read-only OLTP test as the common benchmark