Re: Benchmark comparing PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle

El Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:54:58 -0500
Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> escribió:

> On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Jonah H. Harris
> <jonah(dot)harris(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 3:40 PM, Merlin Moncure
> > <mmoncure(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >>
> >> ISTM you are the one throwing out unsubstantiated assertions
> >> without data to back it up. OP ran benchmark. showed
> >> hardware/configs, and demonstrated result. He was careful to
> >> hedge expectations and gave rationale for his analysis methods.
> >
> > As I pointed out in my last email, he makes claims about PG being
> > faster than Oracle and MySQL based on his results. I've already
> > pointed out significant tuning considerations, for both Postgres
> > and Oracle, which his benchmark did not take into account.
> >
> > This group really surprises me sometimes. For such a smart group
> > of people, I'm not sure why everyone seems to have a problem
> > pointing out design flaws, etc. in -hackers, yet when we want to
> > look good, we'll overlook blatant flaws where benchmarks are
> > concerned.
>
> The biggest flaw in the benchmark by far has got to be that it was
> done with a ramdisk, so it's really only measuring CPU consumption.
> Measuring CPU consumption is interesting, but it doesn't have a lot to
> do with throughput in real-life situations. The benchmark was
> obviously constructed to make PG look good, since the OP even mentions
> on the page that the reason he went to ramdisk was that all of the
> databases, *but particularly PG*, had trouble handling all those
> little writes. (I wonder how much it would help to fiddle with the
> synchronous_commit settings. How do MySQL and Oracle alleviate this
> problem and we can usefully imitate any of it?)
>

The benchmark is NOT constructed to make PostgreSQL look good, that
never was my intention. All databases suffered the I/O bottleneck for
their redo/xlog/binary_log files, specially PostgreSQL but closely
followed by Oracle. For some reason MySQL seems to deal better with I/O
contention, but still gives numbers that are less than the half it gives
with tmpfs.

While using the old array (StorageTek T3), I've played with
synchronous_commit, wal_sync_method, commit_delay... and only setting
wal_sync_method = open_datasync (which, in Solaris, completly disables
I/O syncing) gave better results, for obvious reasons.

Anyway, I think that in the next few months I'll be able to repeat the
tests with a nice SAN, and then we'll have new numbers that will be
more near to "real-world situations" (but synthetic benchmarks always
are synthetic benchmarks) and also we'll be able to compare them with
this ones to see how I/O contetion impacts on each database.