kv_bench (Mace vs RocksDB)

Quick start for reproducible Mace vs RocksDB comparison. Full guide: docs/repro.md.

5-Minute Quickstart

1. Set your storage root (any mount path, not hardcoded to /nvme):

export KV_BENCH_STORAGE_ROOT=/path/to/your/storage/kvbench
mkdir -p "${KV_BENCH_STORAGE_ROOT}"

2. Initialize Python env once: assume that kv_bench repo is located in $HOME

cd "$HOME/kv_bench/scripts"
./init.sh
source ./bin/activate
cd "$HOME/kv_bench"

3. Run baseline comparison (both engines append to the same CSV):

Default quick-baseline timing in these scripts is WARMUP_SECS=3 and MEASURE_SECS=5.

rm -rf "${KV_BENCH_STORAGE_ROOT}/basic_mace" "${KV_BENCH_STORAGE_ROOT}/basic_rocks"
mkdir -p "${KV_BENCH_STORAGE_ROOT}/basic_mace" "${KV_BENCH_STORAGE_ROOT}/basic_rocks"

./scripts/mace.sh "${KV_BENCH_STORAGE_ROOT}/basic_mace" ./scripts/benchmark_results.csv
./scripts/rocksdb.sh "${KV_BENCH_STORAGE_ROOT}/basic_rocks" ./scripts/benchmark_results.csv

4. Plot results:

./scripts/bin/python ./scripts/plot.py ./scripts/benchmark_results.csv ./scripts

5. Print a direct comparison table from the CSV:

./scripts/bin/python ./scripts/compare_baseline.py ./scripts/benchmark_results.csv

What Is Compared

• Comparison unit: rows with identical workload_id, threads, key_size, value_size, durability_mode, read_path
• Fairness rule for read-heavy workloads: get, scan, and W1-W6 run one GC/compaction pass after prefill and before warmup/measurement, so RocksDB is not compared with GC artificially disabled while reads may have to touch multiple SSTs
• Throughput metric: workload-level ops_per_sec (higher is better)
  • W1/W2/W3/W4: mixed read+update throughput
  • W5: mixed read+update+scan throughput
  • W6: scan throughput (counted by scan requests, not scanned key count)
• Tail latency metric: workload-level p99_us (lower is better)
  • This is the mixed p99 of all operations executed in that workload row, not per-op-type p99
  • W1/W2/W3/W4: mixed read+update p99
  • W5: mixed read+update+scan p99
  • W6: scan p99

Raw CSV path: ./scripts/benchmark_results.csv

Full Reproduction

For phase-by-phase commands, knobs, and interpretation rules, use docs/repro.md.