Gaining An Extreme Performance Advantage

Gaining An Extreme Performance Advantage
Posted by Steven Graves, CEO MacObject— 09 May 2014

I’ve written previously on transaction logging, the feature in eXtremeDB (and other database systems) that adds durability to an in-memory database, enabling recovery in the event of system failure. McObject has completed new benchmark tests focusing on transaction logging and performance, using EMC’s XtremSF server-based PCIe flash card technology.

The test results, presented in the free report Gaining an Extreme Performance Advantage, drive home three points: 1) an in-memory database system with transaction logging vastly outperforms a traditional “on-disk” DBMS; 2) this speed advantage is multiplied through careful choice of transaction log storage device; 3) McObject’s database system and EMC’s server-based PCIe flash cards reap the benefits of multi-threading software on multi-core CPUs – especially when the two vendors’ technologies are used together.

For the database operations most likely to induce latency, the eXtremeDB IMDS with transaction logging (IMDS+TL), and storing its transaction log on a hard disk drive (HDD), outperformed the on-disk DBMS w/ HDD storage by more than 5 times. Storing the transaction log using EMC’s technology improved this performance edge dramatically, driving the IMDS+TL to achieve a 2,100% speed advantage over the on-disk DBMS configuration.

A second phase of the benchmark tested scalability by measuring throughput while adding concurrent processes to interact with the database system and its storage. EMC’s and McObject’s technologies both leverage multi-threading on multi-core CPUs: in McObject’s tests using the persistent storage capabilities provided by eXtremeDB Fusion edition (that is, using eXtremeDB as a “pure” on-disk DBMS) and storing the database on EMC XtremSF, the benchmark application with 2 processes running simultaneously was able to complete 3.89 loops per millisecond; with 36 concurrent processes, this grew to 12.21 loops/ms – an increase of 314%.

However, when moving to the eXtremeDB In-Memory Database System with transaction logging, and using EMC XtremSF technology to store the log, the rate of throughput increase was even more impressive – loops per second increased by 505% when scaling to 36 processes from 2 processes.

Sponsored by McObject

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