Documentation Home
MySQL 9.3 Reference Manual
Related Documentation Download this Manual
PDF (US Ltr) - 40.8Mb
PDF (A4) - 40.9Mb
Man Pages (TGZ) - 261.1Kb
Man Pages (Zip) - 368.3Kb
Info (Gzip) - 4.1Mb
Info (Zip) - 4.1Mb


MySQL 9.3 Reference Manual  / ...  / Optimization  / Measuring Performance (Benchmarking)  /  Measuring the Speed of Expressions and Functions

10.13.1 Measuring the Speed of Expressions and Functions

To measure the speed of a specific MySQL expression or function, invoke theBENCHMARK() function using themysql client program. Its syntax isBENCHMARK(loop_count,expr). The return value is always zero, butmysql prints a line displaying approximately how long the statement took to execute. For example:

mysql> SELECT BENCHMARK(1000000,1+1);+------------------------+| BENCHMARK(1000000,1+1) |+------------------------+|                      0 |+------------------------+1 row in set (0.32 sec)

This result was obtained on a Pentium II 400MHz system. It shows that MySQL can execute 1,000,000 simple addition expressions in 0.32 seconds on that system.

The built-in MySQL functions are typically highly optimized, but there may be some exceptions.BENCHMARK() is an excellent tool for finding out if some function is a problem for your queries.