Faban

Faban is practically the consolidation of our benchmark development and management knowledge and experience. It is a facility for developing and running benchmarks. It has two major components, the Faban harness and the Faban driver framework.

The Faban harness is a harness to automate running of server benchmarks as well as a container to host benchmarks allowing new benchmarks to be deployed in a rapid manner. Faban provides a web interface to launch & queue runs, and extensive functionality to view, compare and graph run outputs.

For workload developers creating new benchmarks, Faban also provides a driver framework and component model for rapidly implementing high quality benchmark drivers. The Faban driver framework controls the run lifecycle as well as the stochastic model used to simulate users for the benchmark implemented using this framework. It provides built-in support for all of the major components in Java Enterprise System as well as the Oracle DBMS. It is the harness of choice for all future benchmarks.

This said, the Faban harness in no way restricted to running benchmarks developed using the Faban driver framework alone. It can run existing benchmarks by defining a benchmark wrapper that identifies the processes involved in preparing and running the benchmark, and reporting the results.

In brief, the followings summarize the features and attributes of Faban:

1. Web interface for controlling benchmark runs and viewing results
2. Benchmark run queuing
3. Remote agent management
4. Automated benchmark code distribution to agents
5. Centralized logging
6. Analysis - graphing and comparison of detailed run results

1. Descriptive driver specification.
2. Stochastic model
3. Throughput-oriented measurements with SLA
4. Driver life cycle control
5. Sleep time calibration
6. Time synchronization between remote agents and master
7. Automated time measurements
8. Standardized/extensible reporting

Documentation

Getting Faban up and running is very simple. However, you'll want to read Installation and Getting Started to make sure you have everything in place.
And for complete information, visit the Faban documentation here.

System Requirements

• JDK 1.5.0 or later
• Operating System
• The Faban driver framework is truely OS independent it can run on any JVM 1.5 or later.
  
• The Faban harness is designed to adapt to most operating systems having a Java Virtual Machine, but due to it's functionality which reaches into the OS, adaptation scripts may need to be writted to adapt the Faban harness to a particular operating system. Currently the Faban harness has been tested on Solaris 10, both SPARC and x86. Linux and other Unix adaptation should be relatively easy. Adaptation to windows may be a somewhat more complicated task.
  

Downloads

• Installation and Getting Started
  
• The Faban Server - This package is for installation on the master Faban server.
• The Faban Client - This package is for installation on the driver agent machines and all machines that are part of the SUT.
• Faban Bundling Package - This package is for bundling Faban with benchmarks. It contains build scripts that makes bundling easy and allow generation of the server and client packages of the bundle.
• Faban documentation download
• If you feel adventurous, you may want to grab one of the latest Nightly Builds here