MariaDB 10.1 and MySQL 5.7 performance on commodity hardware

When you have read my previous blog post about MariaDB 10.1 GA performance, you have probably wondered why I didn’t include any numbers for MySQL 5.7. There are two reasons: first MySQL wasn’t GA at that time and secondly MySQL is not running stable on Power8.

Today I will come up with a comparison benchmark. I have chosen some more down-to-earth hardware for that because that is what the majority of our users will be running. Specifically it’s a SP-64 cloud machine from OVH. It has a 4-core Intel CPU and 64G of RAM. Disks aren’t fancy, but the benchmark is again a simplified read-only OLTP workload that runs from memory. …

Sysbench OLTP: MySQL-5.6 vs. MariaDB-10.0

Oracle has now launched MySQL-5.6.10-GA, so it is time to come up with some new benchmark results. The test candidates in this benchmark run are

  • MySQL-5.5.29
  • MySQL-5.6.10
  • MariaDB-5.5.28a
  • MariaDB-10.0.1

The 5.5 versions are in because I wanted to check for any regressions. In the past we have often seen performance regressions in newer versions which were caused by new features.

This time the benchmark was run on a different box. The main difference is that this box does not have SSD but a high performance RAID-5 with 512M of battery-backed cache. …

MariaDB-5.5 Thread Pool Performance

MariaDB-5.5.21-beta is the first MariaDB release featuring the new thread pool. Oracle offers a commercial thread pool plugin for MySQL Enterprise, but now MariaDB brings a thread pool implementation to the community!

If you are not familiar with the term, please read the Knowledge Base article about it.

The main design goal of the thread pool is to increase the scalability of the MariaDB server with many concurrent connections. In order to test and demonstrate this, I have run the sysbench OLTP RO benchmark with up to 4096 threads to compare the new pool-of-threads and the traditional thread-per-connection scheduler:

Benchmark description:

  • sysbench multi table OLTP, readonly
  • 16 tables, totaling 40 mio rows (~10G of data)
  • 16G buffer pool – result is independent of disk performance
  • mysqld bound to 16 cpu cores, sysbench to the other 8

Read/write OLTP benchmark results will be published as soon as they are available. …

Segmented key cache performance results for MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma

Recently I tested our new segmented key cache feature for MyISAM in MariaDB 5.2.2-gamma for performance gains. You can check our new features in MariaDB 5.2 in our Ask Monty Knowledge Base

You will also find the details about the segmented key cache feature in our Knowledge Base at:

We wrote a test in LUA for SysBench v0.5 called select_random_points.lua, to figure out the performance gain of splitting the key cache’s global mutex into several mutex under multi user load. …