How MariaDB and MySQL performance changed over releases

Is performance important for you, along with the latest features and long-term support? Go with MariaDB 11.4. But don’t take our word for it. We asked well known benchmarking expert Mark Callaghan to check out a number of MariaDB and MySQL releases, hit them hard with a tool of his choice, and share his findings.

MariaDB’s performance is stable over the years

The outcome: On the low concurrency load (high concurrency results are being prepared), MariaDB maintained stable performance over the last 10 years and 14 releases, while MySQL performance dropped almost by a third.

Using Lua-enabled sysbench

A quite common benchmark for MySQL is sysbench. It was written nearly 10 years ago by Alexey Kopytov.

Sysbench has modes to benchmark raw CPU performance, mutex speed, scheduler overhead and file IO performance. The probably most often used sysbench mode is OLTP. This benchmark mimics a OLTP scenario with small transactions hitting an optimized database. There are many variables to play with, most important is the number of simulated application threads (option –num-threads). The OLTP benchmark can be run read-only, then it does 14 SELECT queries per transaction. Or it can be run read-write which adds 2 UPDATEs and one INSERT and DELETE. …

MariaDB Introduces Atomic Writes

When dealing with high performance, low latency storage devices, such as SSD cards, one finds bottlenecks in new places. This is a story about such a bottle neck and how to work around it. (more…)

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. …

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. …