I noticed that people were hitting the site for information on how to run mysqlslap.

To help out those searchers, here is a quick mysqlslap howto

1. Make sure you have mysql 5.1.4 or higher. Download MySQL from the MySQL website
2. Make sure your MySQL database is running.
3. Run mysqlslap, using progressively more concurrent threads:

   mysqlslap  --concurrency=1,25,50,100 --iterations=10 --number-int-cols=2 \
   --number-char-cols=3 --auto-generate-sql --csv=/tmp/mysqlslap.csv \
   --engine=blackhole,myisam,innodb  --auto-generate-sql-add-autoincrement \
   --auto-generate-sql-load-type=mixed  --number-of-queries=100  --user=root \
   --password YOURPASSWORDHERE

For detailed descriptions of each parameter see the MySQL documentation:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysqlslap.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysqlslap.html

If you want to see how I used mysqlslap to test mysql performance on Amazon EC2, here are the list of posts

http://blog.dbadojo.com/2007/08/mysql-vs-mysqlslap.html
http://blog.dbadojo.com/2008/01/mysql-vs-mysqlslap-round-2.html
http://blog.dbadojo.com/2008/02/mysql-vs-mysqlslap-round-3.html