---
title: "Benchmarking MariaDB-5.3.4"
publish_date: 2012-02-21
author: "MariaDB"
---

# Benchmarking MariaDB-5.3.4

Last weekend Vadim from Percona published his [MariaDB 5.3.4 benchmark results](http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2012/02/18/mariadb-5-3-4-benchmarks/ "MariaDB 5.3.4 benchmark results"). As the new benchmark guy at Monty Program I take this oportunity to add some more results of my own. One question in the comments to Vadim was if it is fair to compare MariaDB-5.3 with MySQL-5.5. Or if this comparison should be done with MySQL-5.1. The answer is: it does not matter much. MySQL-5.5 and MySQL-5.1 show very similar results in the Sysbench OLTP benchmark. So I created a Sysbench environment pretty much like Vadims and tested the following versions of the MySQL Server:

- MariaDB-5.3.4 – the Monty Program release candidate, both with XtraDB and the InnoDB plugin
- Percona-Server 5.1.61 because it is based on the same XtraDB version as MariaDB-5.3
- Percona-Server 5.5.20 – the current Percona flagship
- MySQL-5.5.20 – the current Oracle flagship

The result:

![sysbench_oltp.png](/sites/default/files/2016-10/sysbench_oltp.png)

Indeed MariaDB-5.3.4 scales significantly worse than MySQL-5.5.20. However Percona-Server 5.1.61 behaves nearly identical and Percona-Server 5.5.20 is only slightly better. If we run MariaDB-5.3.4 with the InnoDB plugin instead of the default XtraDB, then MariaDB outperforms Percona-Server 5.5.20. As a consequence, we will deliver the InnoDB plugin with future binary releases of MariaDB. MySQL-5.1.61 with the InnoDB plugin (not shown in the graph) is between MariaDB-5.3.4(InnoDB-plugin) and MySQL-5.5.20. We are currently investigating why MySQL-5.1 is faster than MariaDB-5.3, even with the same storage engine. Please keep in mind that Sysbench is a highly synthetical benchmark. Real world workload will probably yield different results. Also this benchmark used solid state disks. A storage system with spinning disks might saturate much earlier and would then flatten out the peaks. If I should draw a conclusion, then I would say that for highest concurrency levels you should go for MySQL-5.5. Or wait for MariaDB-5.5 🙂 If your workload includes complex (sub)queries, then you will probably benefit more from MariaDBs [new optimizer features](http://www.bytebot.net/blog/archives/2012/02/05/mariadb-5-3-query-optimizer-by-sergey-petrunia). And if you are running replication, then MariaDB 5.3 with [group-commit](http://kb.askmonty.org/en/group-commit-for-the-binary-log) will [greatly outperform](http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150211546215933) any other MySQL version. Benchmark details: sysbench OLTP multi-table. 16 tables with 250K rows each. 20G InnoDB buffer pool. Data and logs on SSD. Dual socket hexacore Xeon with HT enabled (24 logical cores). You can [download the tarball](http://blog.montyprogram.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/sysbench-XL-2012-02-21.tar.gz) with benchmark scripts, config and raw results.