Re: [PERFORM] Drupal and PostgreSQL - performance issues?

On Sun, Oct 12, 2008 at 9:57 PM, Mikkel Høgh <mikkel(at)hoegh(dot)org> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I've been toying with using PostgreSQL for some of my Drupal sites for some
> time, and after his session at OpenSourceDays in Copenhagen last weekend,
> Magnus Hagander told me that there a quite a few in the PostgreSQL community
> using Drupal.
>
> I have been testing it a bit performance-wise, and the numbers are worrying.
> In my test, MySQL (using InnoDB) had a 40% lead in performance, but I'm
> unsure whether this is indicative for PostgreSQL performance in general or
> perhaps a misconfiguration on my part.

The test you're running is far too simple to tell you which database
will actually be faster in real world usage. No updates, no inserts,
no interesting or complex work goes into just delivering the front
page over and over. I suggest you invest some time learning how to
drive a real load testing tool like jmeter and build realistic test
cases (with insert / update / delete as well as selects) and then see
how the databases perform with 1, 2, 5, 10, 50, 100 consecutive
threads running at once.

Without a realistic test scenario and with no connection pooling and
with no performance tuning, I don't think you should make any
decisions right now about which is faster. It may well be that in a
more realistic testing that mysql keeps up through 5 or 10 client
connections then collapses at 40 or 50, while pgsql keeps climbing in
performance. This is the performance curve I'm used to seeing from
both dbs under heavy load.

In simple terms, you're kicking the tires and making a decision based on that.