I'm making a online game (with hopefully thousands of players each hour) which uses quite a few queries to the mysql database. Before release, It would be nice if I could simulate heavy usage to see the performance. Is there anyway to do this?

Thanks in advance

• php
• mysql

Look at mysqlslap. It is a load emulator that lets you see how well a particular query set or table engine performs under high-load conditions.

More information here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysqlslap.html

Edit: I just noticed this tool is only available for MySQL > 5.1.4. I don't know what version you are currently using.

If you can find out the server's processor and memory usage for a single query, you can test your application, get those result and multiply them by the number of users you want to see if the server can afford to attend. You also can start your application multiple times but I don't think your computer can handle 100 application instances. If you only want to check how many SQL queries can be processed you can also created a server-script with PHP, ASP or whatever language which could calculate the response time. You run that script in 100 windows at the same time and see what happen.