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Comparing MySQL Performance

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the last-ounce-of-quickness dept.

An anonymous reader writes "With the introduction of the 2.6 Linux kernel, FreeBSD 5-STABLE, Solaris 10, and now NetBSD 2.0, you might be wondering which of them offers superior database performance. These two articles will show you how to benchmark operating system performance using MySQL on these operating systems so you can find out for yourself if you're missing out. While this may not necessarily be indicative of overall system performance or overall database application performance, it will tell you specifically how well MySQL performs on your platform."

4 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. Re:postgres by TheWingThing · · Score: 5, Informative

    If you R the FA, which not many do these days, he says he didnt have the time though he planned to do both, so he did MySQL. This is mentioned in the first link, which was /.ed last week. The first link was Part 1 which explains the setup and procedure. Part 2 (second link) explains the results.

  2. Tuning on FreeBSD by zulux · · Score: 5, Informative

    On a PostgreSQL install, I almost quadrulpeled performance on FreeBSD 4.10 by bumping up the SHMMAX in FreeBSD, then tweaking PostgreSQL to use it for queries and indexes.

    Make sure FreeBSD has DMA turned on as well, and make CFLAGS somthing other than a 486.

    All of the *BSD are *VERY VERY* conservative and will do a lot better when properly configured.

    --

    Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

  3. If TFA gets slashdotted, these are his conclusions by TheWingThing · · Score: 5, Informative

    Conclusion/final thoughts

    Both Linux 2.4 and 2.6 had the strongest showing overall for these tests, dominating just about every benchmark no matter the workload. Scalability for both kernels was also excellent with addition of an extra processor. In fact, I was surprised how well 2.4 had done, as I had somewhat expected 2.6 to show at least a noticeable, if slight, increase over 2.4. Instead, they took turns besting each other from test to test -- and in scalability -- for a fairly even overall showing.

    Solaris 10 had a very strong showing as well, having great speed as well as great scalability. I think the results show that Solaris 10 is a great platform for MySQL. Of course, I didn't have Super Smack results as I couldn't get Super Smack to port to Solaris (as detailed in the previous article), so bear that in mind.

    NetBSD 2.0 also had a very strong showing, although it was tarnished by two issues. One, MySQL on NetBSD 2.0 doesn't scale with the addition of CPUs. The results would seem to indicate that it might be wise to run a uniprocessor kernel even if two processors are available. The other issue was the poor I/O performance for the 10M row SysBench test. The SMP scalability issue is easy to understand since, to be fair, this is the first NetBSD release to support multiple processors. The I/O issue is more of a mystery, however.

    FreeBSD 5.3 did relatively well in both KSE and linuxthreads mode, although with all the work that's been done in the SMP and threading realms, I was a little disappointed with the results. Still, it seems that the native threading model for the production release of FreeBSD-5 is ready for prime time, and can replace the long-standing FreeBSD convention of using linuxthreads with MySQL.

    For FreeBSD 4.11, however, linuxthreads definitely helped with performance (and in many cases outperformed FreeBSD 5.3). With libc_r, performance lagged far behind linuxthreads for many tests, and there was little scalability. I would say it's highly advisable to build your FreeBSD 4.11 MySQL binary with linuxthreads.

    For all the time it took, I think the tests were worth it. I learned quite a bit about MySQL performance in general, and I'd like to again thank Peter Zaitsev for his methodology recommendations and input, as well as Jenny Chen from Sun for her input.

  4. Procedural problem with NetBSD multiprocessor by Bushcat · · Score: 5, Informative
    It seems like the performance of NetBSD will be re-evaluated, so expect the results to be recast in the next few days.

    See the message thread titled "NetBSD performance" at http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/12 /27/1243207: an anonymous reader asks "Did you enable PTHREAD_CONCURRENCY? You have to set that variable to the number of CPUs in your system, else you won't be able to run more than one thread at a time, even you have more than one...". He replies "Sunofa. The $PTHREAD_CONCURRENCY environment variable wasn't set, as I had no idea it was an option. ... It could very well be the issue. In the next few days I'll re-run the NetBSD tests with that set."