Comments - Aria System Variables: aria_block_size
Content reproduced on this site is the property of its respective owners,
and this content is not reviewed in advance by MariaDB. The views, information and opinions
expressed by this content do not necessarily represent those of MariaDB or any other party.
For full table scans, the default PAGE format is slower than the DYNAMIC and FIXED formats. Perhaps this explains the difference in your case. See the Aria FAQ.
I tried reducing aria_block_size to 2048 but performance improvements were negligible. So I guess that using PAGE format, as Ian said, explains the very noticeable drop in performance compared to MyISAM.
Just for the fun of it, I'll give it a try with DYNAMIC format, but that does mean that the tables won't be crash free.
I read that Aria 2.5 will focus on performance improvements. Any chance that full tables scans will be addressed, if that's even possible?
Yes, only PAGE format tables (with TRANSACTIONAL=1, which is not the default) are crash safe. There's not much activity with Aria development at the moment, so I'm not sure when full scan performance will be looked at.