CREATE, INSERT, SELECT, DROP benchmark

Inspired by PeterZ’s Opening Tables scalability post, I decided to try a little benchmark. This benchmark involved the following:

  • Create 50,000 tables
  • CREATE TABLE t{$i} (i int primary key)
  • Insert one row into each table
  • select * from each table
  • drop each table
  • I wanted to test file system impact on this benchmark. So, I created a new LVM volume, 10GB in size. I extracted a ‘make bin-dist’ of a recent MySQL 5.1 tree, did a “mysql-test-run.pl –start-and-exit” and ran my script, timing real time with time.

    For a default ext3 file system creating MyISAM tables, the test took 15min 8sec.

    For a default xfs file sytem creating MyISAM tables, the test took 7min 20sec.

    For an XFS file system with a 100MB Version 2 log creating MyISAM tables, the test took 7min 32sec – which is within repeatability of the default XFS file system. So log size and version made no real difference.

    For a default reiserfs (v3) file system creating MyISAM tables, the test took 9m 44sec.

    For a ext3 file system with the dir_index option enabled creating MyISAM tables, the test took 14min 21sec.

    For an approximate measure of the CREATE performance…. ext3 and reiserfs averaged about 100 tables/second (although after the 20,000 mark, reiserfs seemed to speed up a little). XFS  averaged about 333 tables/second. I credit this to the check for if the files exist being performed by a b-tree lookup in XFS once the directory reached a certain size.

    Interestingly, DROPPING the tables was amazingly fast on ext3 – about 2500/sec. XFS about 1000/sec. So ext3 can destroy easier than it can create while XFS keeps up to speed with itself.

    What about InnoDB tables? Well…

    ext3(default): 21m 11s

    xfs(default): 12m 48s

    ext3(dir_index): 21m 11s

    Interestingly the create rate for XFS was around 500 tables/second – half that of MyISAM tables.

    These are interesting results for those who use a lot of temporary tables or do lots of create/drop tables as part of daily life.

    All tests performed on a Western Digital 250GB 7200rpm drive in a 2.8Ghz 800Mhz FSB P4 with  2GB memory running Ubuntu 6.10 with HT enabled.

    At the end of the test, the ibdata1 file had grown to a little over 800MB – still enough to fit in memory. If we increased this to maybe 200,000 tables (presumably about a 3.2GB file) that wouldn’t fit in cache, then the extents of XFS would probably make it perform better when doing INSERT and SELECT queries as opposed to the list of blocks that ext3 uses. This is because the Linux kernel caches the mapping of in memory block to disk block lookup making the efficiency of this in the file system irrelevant for data sets less than memory size.

    So go tell your friends: XFS is still the coolest kid on the block.

    4 thoughts on “CREATE, INSERT, SELECT, DROP benchmark

    1. Steward,

      First I should note something seems to be fishy out there for all file systems.
      If you use default settings which has sync_frm=1 you should have had fsync called for each frm created which must limit you to about 100 tables created on this type of hard drive as you did not have battery backed up cache.

      Now regarding how cool are file systems I would rather see some multi user benchmark ie 100 threads populating 500 tables each, doing selects from random tables or something similar.

      especially with MySQL working with data is what you actually care not simply creating.

    2. yes, it’s not exactly real-world… but was surprised anyway.

      If default is sync_frm, then shouldn’t mysql-test-run start with it? hrrm… may have to check somehow…..

      know of any existing benchamrk that does that many therads creating and populating tables like that? would be happy to optimise file system related stuff for it (as i’m sure we run into problems).

      recent tests showed less than ideal MyISAM data and index file fragmentation with the default XFS allocator on long-running large insert jobs. It is tempting to add a call to the file system repacker for OPTIMIZE….

      one day perhaps i’ll run some DBT2 tests on the different file systems.

    3. Did you have innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 to make InnoDB do an extra fsync during the record insert? As Peter noted, you’re getting quite high rates here unless you’re not doing the fsyncs that provide durability.

      Your drive can do a physical limit of 120 rotations per second and you somehow managed to do more creates than that. Not possible when you’re doing the fsyncs and they need at least one rotation each.

      Using 5.1.12 or later should help InnoDB compared to 5.0.

    4. i just used what mysql-test-run started… which looks like it isn’t flush_log_at_trx_commit…. however, in the case of temporary tables, the results are still interesting (as you don’t need to care about disk durability for temp tables)

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