Testing embedded SQL and network connection performance (dbping)

You can use the Ping utility (dbping) to obtain information about the performance of embedded SQL connections and the network by specifying the -s or -st options. The following statistics are gathered:

Statistic Description
DBLib connect and disconnect The time to perform one DBLib connect and disconnect. The performance of connecting and disconnecting using other interfaces, such as ODBC, is typically slower than DBLib because more requests are required to complete the connection.
Round trip simple request The time it takes to send a request from the client to the server plus the time it takes to send a response from the server back to the client. The round trip time is twice the average latency.
Send throughput The throughput based on transferring 100 KB of data for each iteration from dbping to the database server.
Receive throughput The throughput based on transferring 100 KB of data for each iteration from the database server to dbping.

If your network has both high round trip times and high throughput, then reported throughput will be lower than your actual network throughput because of the high round trip times. Using dbping -s can be useful to give an indication of whether communication compression may improve performance. The performance statistics are approximate, and are more accurate when both the client and server computers are fairly idle. The transferred data can be compressed to approximately 25% of its original size if communication compression is used:

The following is an example of the output from dbping -s for the dbping command:

dbping -s -c "UID=DBA;PWD=sql;Host=localhost;Server=demo12"


SQL Anywhere Server Ping Utility Version 12.0.1.3149
Connected to SQL Anywhere 12.0.1.3149 server "sampleserver" and database "sample"
at address 10.25.107.108
Performance Statistic           Number            Total Time    Average

----------------------------    --------------    ----------    ------------
DBLib connect and disconnect      200 times         10 msec        <1 msec
Round trip simple request       10900 requests    1024 msec        <1 msec
Send throughput                 86800 KB          1024 msec     84765 KB/sec
Receive throughput              84300 KB          1024 msec     82324 KB/sec
Ping database successful.
 See also