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Comparing MySQL Performance 362

Posted by CowboyNeal 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."
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Comparing MySQL Performance More

Comparing MySQL Performance

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  • postgres (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fludlight ( 165773 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @12:55AM (#11638961)
    what about postgresql?

    • Re:postgres (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheWingThing ( 686802 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:03AM (#11639009)
      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.

    • MySQL vs PostgreSQL (Score:4, Informative)

      by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @03:00AM (#11639536) Homepage Journal

      what about postgresql?

      That is a very good question, I don't know why has it been moderated as off-topic. Naturally it is useless to compare MySQL performance to MySQL performance ignoring any other options. (It is essentially the same tactic Micro$oft is doing all the time! Do we really want to parrot them?) First of all, there are MySQL gotchas [sql-info.de] and PostgreSQL gotchas [sql-info.de], so you have to know whether the particular glitches are acceptable for you before you decide to use either RDBMS. Understanding the relational algebra [wikipedia.org], set theory [wikipedia.org] and predicate calculus [wikipedia.org] is essential to understand what the relational model [wikipedia.org] is all about. Lack of this knowledge often leads to confusing tuples [wikipedia.org] with OOP [wikipedia.org]-style objects [wikipedia.org] and other stupidity, so you will save a lot of time learning it first.

      Now, the performance. Generally speaking MySQL is faster for a heavy load of simple read-only queries (like Slashdot) while PostgreSQL is faster for complex read-write queries (like a bank). Once you turn on the ACID support in MySQL it is no longer so fast, and it can really crawl because of row or even table (sic!) locking, a mistake avoided for decades by any advanced database. Here is another comparison [summersault.com]. See also this recent thread [slashdot.org] on Slashdot. One of the best comparisons of Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL was done by the Computer division of Fermilab [fnal.gov] (Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory [fnal.gov]), this is a must-read.

      There is a lot to read about it [google.com] if you need more comarisons, but the general rule of thumb is that if you want lots of very simple read-only and very few read-write queries when the integrity of your data is not critical, you should probably choose MySQL. When you need that (or better) speed but the data is critical and you need ACID [wikipedia.org] transactions which would severly slow down MySQL, try SQLite [sqlite.org], the easiest choice there is, especially using Perl [cpan.org] where you don't even need to install it (but just like with every other database, there are SQLite gotchas [sqlite.org] too, you need to be aware of them). If you need full ANSI SQL compatibility, ACID transactions, scalability and your data integrity is important, you should probably choose Oracle or PostgreSQL. There are also licensing issues. Oracle is proprietary. MySQL is GPL so you need to pay if you want to use it in any non-GPL software. PostgreSQL is released under a free-for-all BSD license. SQLite is public domain.

      As you can see, there is no one-size-fits-all database. Every one has its strengths and weaknesses. The correct choice is a matter of trade-offs and finding out which database is optimal for your particular niche. Good luck.

      • > MySQL is GPL so you need to pay if you want to use it in any non-GPL software.

        I find it quite amazing how dozens of companies I know have no clue about mySQL licensing. They think everything one finds on a Linux install CDs is free.

        While it's unlikely mySQL.com will ever squeeze these guys into paying up, it's funny to see all those bozos thinking they've living in compliance.

      • Thanks for the wonderfully written post!

      • What about the Firebird [firebirdsql.org] relational database?

        Evans Data [evansdata.com] says it is the best, in a survey done for 2005, but copyrighted 2003. (I'm uncertain how much they should be trusted.)

        • Re:What about Firebird? - good point (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 11, 2005 @05:17AM (#11640032)
          What about the Firebird relational database?

          Good point. "Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL-92 features" [emphasis added] PostgreSQL "supports SQL92 and SQL99" [emphasis added]. "New code modules added to Firebird are licensed under the Initial Developer's Public License. (IDPL). The original modules released by Inprise are licensed under the InterBase Public License v.1.0. Both licences are modified versions of the Mozilla Public License v.1.1." On the other hand, "PostgreSQL is released under the BSD license." Other than that they are mostly comparable, so you have risen a very good point. If you don't need standard SQL support and the license is acceptable, Firebird is a very good option.

      • Re:MySQL vs PostgreSQL (Score:5, Interesting)

        by agilen ( 410830 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @08:03AM (#11640520)
        He was modded offtopic, because this article was about OS benchmarks, not database benchmarks. The title of TFA is "Using MySQL to benchmark OS performance"...so its seeing which OS mySQL runs best on, not which database is best.

      • License correction on MySQL (Score:5, Interesting)

        by scorp1us ( 235526 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @08:50AM (#11640774) Journal
        While your post is thorough and accurate,
        you glossed over the fact that MySQL is now dual licensed. This DOES have repercussions. The GPL version can only be used by GPL software OR as a special exception. The special exception is made for PHP (and maybe others). If you are a Bank and choose MySQL you have to BUY a license.

        I wonder how much there is to the MySQL great for websites (many read, few write) and the PHP license exception.

        MySQL 4+ is not the MySQL that we all came to know and love in the 3.x days. Previously, I used MySQL 3.x but when I needed to upgrade, I moved to PostgreSQL because of the new license alone.

        Let me re iterate my take. PHP license allows you to make commercial websites with it. MySQL allows its GPL license to be used with PHP regardless of purpose of the PHP scripts by special exception. Had there been no special exception, we'd have seen the downfall of MySQL and the upshoot of PostgreSQL or SQLite.

        As a user/admin of all 3, I find that you can either use PostgreSQL or get away with using SQLite. Incedentally, try using SQLite with SQLRelay [sourceforge.net] if you need network access for SQLite.

  • What no Windows benchmarks? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sjrstory ( 839289 ) * on Friday February 11, 2005 @12:58AM (#11638985) Homepage
    I thought Windows XP was supposed to be the Fastest and the Most Reliable OS in the World [techiwarehouse.com]

    ...never believe everything you read on the Intarweb. ;)
    • All kidding aside, it would have been good to see these test also running on XP and OSX.

      • Re:What no Windows benchmarks? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by sbryant ( 93075 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @04:12AM (#11639782)

        Certainly, XP (also 2K, 2K3) would have been an interesting comparison. OSX, however, is out of the question - all of the others ran on exactly the same hardware, a dual 1GHz PIII system. The point of the test was to see operating differences, without the hardware being a factor.

        Of course, it would be possible to run the tests on the same Mac under OSX, Linux and any other OS available for that platform. That might have been interesting, but you wouldn't be able to compare the results directly to those from the PIII system.

        -- Steve

        • Well, you could run the opensource darwin kernel on the intel box, not quite OSX but it's the closest you can currently get..
          You could also compare netbsd/darwin/linux between x86 and ppc systems to get some idea of the performance differences between the 2 architectures.
      • As an other poster hinted, Windows 2000 server or 2003 server _would) be an interesting comparison. And Windows (albeit with SQL Server) does not do too badly when it comes to database performance, particularly when you consider Price/Performance. [tpc.org]

        • Re:XP isn't a server operating system (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          And Windows (albeit with SQL Server) does not do too badly when it comes to database performance,

          You can't just fire a MySQL benchmark at SQL Server, though, and expect it to perform well. SQL Server is much less of a SELECT engine than MySQL; you need to use different paradigms, notably heavy use of stored procedures and functions.

          Oracle is the middle ground - it performs very well if you program to its own model or not.

  • That's all well and good, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sheetrock ( 152993 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:00AM (#11638991) Homepage Journal
    MySQL is a different animal from PostgreSQL, which is itself a horse of a different color than DBI. To truly profile these operating systems you must take into account the differences in:
    • Tuple calculus
    • Transaction journaling
    • Operator space/system call overhead
    • Disk cache timings
    And much more... in essence, you can't be certain these benchmarks hold true for the performance of all databases and it may even be a mute argument -- the same operating system may be tweaked differently if you're fileserving or mailserving or networkserving or if you're only dataserving. A useful tool, but one that must be run on each server.

  • mmm - performance (Score:3, Informative)

    by zoloto ( 586738 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:00AM (#11638994)
    There was another test that included PG-SQL, but I can't find the link now. Basically stating that posgresql burned the rest of them out of the water on a mid ranged server

    if anyone finds the study/test, post a link?

  • Tuning on FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:07AM (#11639033) Homepage Journal
    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.

    • Re:Tuning on FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)

      by a11 ( 716827 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @02:36AM (#11639442)
      Valid point. RedHat Linux is tuned for Oracle - including a larger shared memory region. A more valid comparison would be if each OS was first tuned for the database.
      Something like shared memory, which is used for sorting, caching, and hashes, would slow a database down quite a bit if there was not enough.
      I work with multi-terabyte databases daily, and by my observation, the flavor of UNIX is irrelevant if the IPC resources are adequate. When you're scanning a gig from disk, all DMA, an extra second in the kernel doesn't count in the O().

    • Re:Tuning on FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)

      by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnarNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday February 11, 2005 @02:42AM (#11639468) Homepage Journal
      It is almost a pity that ULE came back online just recently. I would be very much interested in a test with the ULE scheduler as well. See this [freebsd.org] post.I've been stress-testing it in the past few days (capturing tv progs with rtrpio 0 on mplayer into divx5 624x468 all filters - hqdn3d,hb/vb/dr/lb/ etc. - on in 4800 bitrate - on my athlon xp 2400+ and a very crappy capture card) - and so far, no problems.

      Nevertheless, this is a very good benchmark conducted in a fair manner. I was pretty much surprised at how the guy lacking support (from Solaris no less) went on to find out by himself how to increase performance. This also underlies the point made by many in the "netbsd vs. free" benchmarK about the focus of FreeBSD being SMP in the past few years ... which has payed off nicely it seems.

    • Re:Tuning on FreeBSD (Score:3, Informative)

      by Dom2 ( 838 )
      Bear in mind that there are limits to the effectiveness of this technique. Spend a while with this tuning document [varlena.com] for best results.

      -Dom


    • Would you mind posting your tunings? Or, e-mail them to cjsnell on the gmail.com. :)

      Chris

  • If TFA gets slashdotted, these are his conclusions (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheWingThing ( 686802 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:09AM (#11639041)
    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.

  • Why do people use MySQL over Postgres? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Vellmont ( 569020 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:09AM (#11639043) Homepage
    Slightly off topic, but if it's really performance you want, why don't people just use Postgres? It's had a much better feature set for years, and is starting to get enterprise level features. It seems like MySQL is somehow the default choice for open source projects, but as far as I can tell it offers no advantages and many disadvantages over postgres.
    Is it just MySQL is slightly easier to setup?
    • MySQL got the head start. Postgres has had a better feature set for a long time now, but when I first looked at it you couldn't do left joins and all triggers had to be written in C. At the same time MySQL could ... well .. do what MySQL does now.

      So MySQL became the popular open-source database.

    • same reason people use windows (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RelliK ( 4466 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:26AM (#11639134)
      because everyone else does.
    • I was at Barnes & Noble tonight, waiting to go pick someone up at the airport. Looking through the tech-book section, apart from noticing a lack of theory books, I noticed that MySQL has done well for itself in the publishing world. SQL books most often refer to MySQL for examples, PHP books (and other "learn this language so you can incorrectly apply what you halfway learn to any problem you encounter" books) generally include a large section devoted to database stuff, seemingly always involving MySQL
      • And MySQL's popularity has lead to a lot of people learning some very bad habits (particularly about doing a lot of client-side work, like joins or aggregates, or using sub-queries where joins should work)

        I'm sorry, but how does MySQL's popularity lead to people using sub-queries in place of joins? It's only with MySQL 4.1 which was only recently released that decent sub-query support even existed in MySQL. As for the comment about indexes, it's been possible to specify exactly which indexes a query sho
      • Easy, it is historic. Way back in the early days of Linux Postgres did not do SQL, which left you with two choices, mSQL and MySQL. Basically mSQL fell by the wayside due to licensing issues which left MySQL as the only free SQL database available.

        From there on in there is a certain amount of built in momentum that is hard to stop. Just look at the tactics that Microsoft resorted to, in order to overcome the momentum that Netscape had.
    • Slightly off topic, but if it's really performance you want, why don't people just use Postgres?

      When I measured MySQL and PostgreSQL on very simple databases, MySQL was faster (slightly faster on reading, waaaaaay faster on writing). Since most things people need a database for just requires simple databases, MySQL wins on performance in most applications.

      • waaaaaay faster on writing

        I'd be interested to see some benchmark results. I doubt that is true for highly concurrent UPDATEs. And you also failed to mention whether you were using MyISAM or InnoDB.

        I think that databases should be benchmarked based on the application, not a set of queries.

        Also, you should take into account concurrency, since that usually matters when performance matters.

    • Re:Why do people use MySQL over Postgres? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SerialHistorian ( 565638 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @02:00AM (#11639291)
      I've written a bunch of enterprise-class stuff on MySQL.

      The first and second answers are inertia. All of my tools work with MySQL and I'd have to spend a week or two re-writing them for PostgresSQL, and I can't shake loose that kind of time right now.

      Also, I have a set of redundant, mirrored MySQL servers in my colo box that run all of the websites I've built, and I'd have to get more rack space or convert everything over to Postgres at the same time. Neither of which are cost effective when what I have ... works.

      The third answer is that MySQL is blazingly fast at doing simple things. Where Oracle (The other RDBMS that I'm familiar with) can return simple select queries or complex insert or joined select queries in .5 to 1.0 seconds each, MySQL can return simple queries in .01 seconds and stupidly complex queries in 5-10 seconds. Since 100% of what I'm doing is simple selects or can be hacked very quickly to seem like simple selects, there's no reason to use anything more powerful for what I'm doing.

      I don't need to have "good habits" ... I don't need to have nth degree optimized queries. I don't use 99.99% of the features that MySQL has, not to mention all the features that Postgres has that I wouldn't use. (And don't get me started on Oracle.) It's also faster for me, in both database query return and programmer time, to execute 5 simple, general, fast queries that are part of a code library (and when the database structure changes, edit that one code library) than it is for me to write one really complex query for each code module (and have to edit every module when the database structure changes).

      What it comes down to is that it works well as a lightweight database for websites and web apps, and there's a ton of community support and literature. It's not Oracle. It never will be. It's not useful for everything. But when you need a lightweight database to handle a ton of simple select queries without melting down, .... MySQL fits the bill. Why swat a fly with a sledgehammer?

      • Say what? (Score:5, Informative)

        by blorg ( 726186 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @05:59AM (#11640156)
        Where Oracle ... can return simple select queries or complex insert or joined select queries in .5 to 1.0 seconds each

        If Oracle is taking .5 to 1.0 seconds to return 'simple select queries', you are doing something wrong. Very large unindexed tables, perhaps. Alternatively if Oracle is taking the same amount of time to return simple and complex queries, that might indicate that something is wrong with the connection between your app and Oracle.

        Your 'code library' sounds an awful lot like what stored procedures tend to be useful for - presenting a stable external 'API' for accessing the database. If the database changes internally, you just change the stored procedures, and all applications using these procedures carry on as normal.

        I don't need to have "good habits" ... I don't need to have nth degree optimized queries.

        Uh huh.

        I agree completely that you don't need to 'swat a fly with a sledgehammer' and some applications genuinely only do need a simple database with a few simple tables.

        But good habits come in useful, particularly if circumstances change and you have to scale up rapidly - your website becomes massively more popular, your HR application suddenly needs to incorporate new features, whatever. And in any case MySQL has been getting a lot more advanced database features lately, so it's no harm to know them. They might just come in handy.

      • Re:Why do people use MySQL over Postgres? (Score:4, Funny)

        by aixou ( 756713 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @06:08AM (#11640175)
        Why swat a fly with a sledgehammer?

        As an exercise of motor skills.
    • because mysql is easier for ISPs to manage. adding new users with very fine grained db control is very simple for ISPs. not so with postgresql -- it can be a real bear for ISPs to manage with 1000's of separate users.

      and ISPs are the driving force behind a lot of what is widely deployed.

      this is one of the same reasons PHP won out over everything else -- because it integrates easily and because it's easy to manage. not because it's "the best" designed language or the most powerful.

      mysql is "good enough",
      • Ah, ah. This is the reason that there are a lot of tools out there - which is one of the reasons that I use MySQL in an in-house projects. Not because it's the best featured SQL database in the world. It looks like a benign cycle is in place.

        Most jobs you need tools which are "good enough". Hang on - isn't this one of the reasons that MS win out? It also gives the uber-geeks something to sneer about.
    • I use Mysql (and PHP) because the first article I read on dynamic web pages involved LAMP. Finding more LAMP articles was a snap, and a week later my site was working and I didn't care what else was out there.
    • Because MySQL is so much easier to say than PostgreSQL... Sounds like a speech impediment.

  • Useless Benchmarks (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:13AM (#11639061)
    From the article: I used the GENERIC configurations unmodified, expect for above-mentioned changes and adding SMP support.

    FreeBSD's GENERIC kernel config is for i486. If he'd commented out two lines, he could've tested for i686, which is what a P3 is. As it is, these benchmarks aren't helpful at all, because the optimizations assume a machine inferior to what's actually being used. He failed to eliminate enough variables for these to be meaningful.

    • Re:Useless Benchmarks (Score:4, Insightful)

      by setagllib ( 753300 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @02:00AM (#11639293)
      Entirely right, and some user-space optimization could have gotten the final few percent in too. He installed stock BSDs and recompiled their kernels straight, didn't tweak any options that weren't necessary to run the suite, and compared to a Linux optimized from the ground up (Gentoo + his knowledge of Linux itself). Real clever benchmark.

      That NetBSD performed worse than FreeBSD for disk IO is really strange. I have never seen this happen in any of the machines I've tried both on (hint: a lot), so either he has a very exotic disk controller which isn't supported properly (weird) or there's a disturbance in the force. Members of the mailing lists are talking it over with him now, and a follow-up should arrive eventually.

      I would have liked to see results of FreeBSD 5-STABLE too, because he compared a refined Linux and a solid NetBSD to a FreeBSD release that was deemed not-ready-for-benching-let-alone-production on day 0, which gave it little chance. It's interesting to see if the claims 5.4 will be much better hold water.

  • use windows! (Score:5, Funny)

    by mboverload ( 657893 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:14AM (#11639066) Journal
    I use Windows Server 2003 for all my SQL needs. It is 20% faster than an equivilent Linux machine!

    Well, at least thats what Microsoft told me...

  • Different filesystems? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dolphinling ( 720774 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:25AM (#11639128) Homepage Journal

    I might just be naive, but doesn't database performance depend a lot more on filesystem than OS?

  • Mac OS X. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by freemacmini ( 852263 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:28AM (#11639142)
    Too bad he could not test on Mac OS X.

    Of course in order to do that he would have to install the OSes on a PPC machine and I don't think freebsd on PPC is ready for prime time yet.

  • How relevant are those benchmarks (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Donny Smith ( 567043 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @01:31AM (#11639162)
    Does anyone go: "OK, I need the OS for my mySQL project. I'll benchmark BSD, Linux, Windows, and choose the fastest OS."

    Difference among OS should be pretty much unimportant unless one's an ISP or big enterprise. I would choose the OS based on completely different criteria:
    1) Existing skillset (advantage to existing skills)
    2) Existing deployed OS (advantage to OS already deployed)
    3) My company's OS strategy (advantage to the OS and the CPU platform we chose to standardize on)
    4) Existing software (if I already have X vendor's backup agent for mySQL on Linux or database tuning tools, I wouldn't use BSD just to (potentially) gain an extra 5% in some ludicrous benchmark result).

    Today's hardware (and operating systems) are so cheap that it's almost irrelevant what OS and hardware goes into many a project.
    Look at the new HP's 25p and 35p blades (Opteron-based) - a 2 processor 1GB RAM version is just some $1,700 more expensive than a 1 processor 512MB RAM version.
    It's easy to lose that $1,700 in downtime, spend it on a Windows engineer's new RHCE or such...
    • Not to mention what it takes to tune the OS and keep it running correctly.

      In my experience Linux is MUCH easier to keep running than Windows.

      Windows administration relies on far too many "black magic" registry tweaks. In order to make adjustments in many cases, you need to set obscure registry entries that are usually only known through rumor and hearsay. (If you can fix it at all.) Every place I have worked with a mixed environment, the Windows admins spent more time fixing and patching and tuning to

  • Procedural problem with NetBSD multiprocessor (Score:5, Informative)

    by Bushcat ( 615449 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @02:08AM (#11639321)
    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 [newsforge.com]: 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."

  • Missing option (Score:5, Interesting)

    by xgamer04 ( 248962 ) <(moc.oohay) (ta) (40remagx)> on Friday February 11, 2005 @03:10AM (#11639570)
    What about Mac OS X? I know (actually, not really) that Solaris doesn't run on Apple hardware, but it would be interesting to compare the same stuff on an Xserve and also be able to test the OS X performance.
    • What about Mac OS X?

      We use MySQL on a G5 xserve. Performance hasn't been a problem for us, but we haven't really stress tested it yet. We also use MySQL on two of our Suns (V210 Dual 1.25 [sun.com]) and it has been rock solid and extremely fast on both machines. We stress tested Apache2 on the xserve and it fell apart before the V210... so I'm going to say that the v210 is probably a better mysql box than the xserve as well.. but the xserve is $1000 cheaper.

      FWIW, mysql says that the most *stable* platforms fo

  • Solaris 10 -- the *good* x86 Solaris (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tesmako ( 602075 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @04:51AM (#11639933) Homepage
    Must say that it is very nice to see Solaris up there in the top in the tests that it was featured in. Seems Sun was not joking around when they claimed that Solaris 10 would be greatly improved on x86. As is often said around here; More choice is good.

  • databases ? where ? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by robnauta ( 716284 )
    The heading is misleading. What do 'database performance' and testing a toy like mySQL have to do with eachother ?

    MySQL may be fast, because its features are so limited. Sure, it stores and retrieves records, but its partial implementation of SQL (without subqueries etc) and blatant bugs that violate SQL (try inserting '123456' into a varchar(4) column, it will silently truncate to '1234' instead of giving a 'Inserted value too large for column' error) make it useless for anything reliable.

    If 'fast' is

  • Amazing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cranos ( 592602 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @06:42AM (#11640271) Homepage Journal
    Somebody posts a comparison of an application running on different OS's as a system benchmark, and what do people do? Attack MySQL.

    God guys get over it, MySQL is here and it has actually proven itself to be usefull. Yes its missing features and has issues, but it fills the niche it is aimed at.

  • Impressed with Solaris (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MajorDick ( 735308 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @07:29AM (#11640406)
    I have always had a soft sop for Solaris since 2.51, it secure, and stable, in my experience, but alas its always been SLOW on x86 hardware.
    These benchmarks show that at least with mySql its pretty fast, but more importantly look at the solaris benchmarks, they are nearly identically consistent across all test, where others vary much.

    Ive always kinda thought of Solaris as a 4 wheel drive truck in low range, but it looks like they added a turbo :) I wonder if its a result of better x86 optimization or the new Filesystem

  • Comparing MySQL to PostgreSQL (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Sierpinski ( 266120 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @08:11AM (#11640554)
    One thing I noticed about version of mysql (prior to version 4.1, I believe) was that mysql didn't support the notion of nested queries, which at the time, was what I really needed to perform. An upgrade to mysql 4.1 solved this, but something that what I would consider to be an integral part of sql was just "left out" of previous versions just reinforced my decision to use PostgreSQL instead. (The mysql databaase was a product of a coworker, not using our organizational standards.)
  • The FreeBSD-5.x releases still compile with the debug code and assertions. From the libc_r/Makefile [freebsd.org] :
    # Uncomment this if you want libc_r to contain debug information for
    # thread locking.
    CFLAGS+=-D_LOCK_DEBUG

    # enable extra internal consistancy checks
    CFLAGS+=-D_PTHREADS_INVARIANTS

    It was foolish, in my opinion, to keep this in the release. I wonder, how many points the OS lost in the benchmarks because of it...

  • MySQL had better be fast - price increase (Score:3)

    by xxxJonBoyxxx ( 565205 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @10:09AM (#11641504)
    MySQL had better be fast - they just cranked the price again. In the last two months the per-100-copy bulk price of MySQL jumped from about $100 to about $230 a server.

    (Yeah, I'm looking hard at Postgres now.)

  • Gentoo From Scratch??? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by RoadWarriorX ( 522317 ) on Friday February 11, 2005 @04:09PM (#11646360) Homepage
    After reading the benchmarks, I noticed that the Linux distribution chosen was Gentoo. I like Gentoo (and use it myself). The author of the newsforge article does not really state if the all of the kernel, libraries and applications were built completely from scratch or did he use a stage 2 or 3 install.

    If the box was built from source, I would expect that Linux benchmarks would be higher simply because the kernel, libraries, and applications were most likely tuned to the hardware. Otherwise, I would like to see RedHat, or SUSE, or other "out of the box" distros in addition to the others.

    Just my $0.02

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