Is MySQL getting faster?

Is MySQL getting faster over time? I think so. It is difficult to keep things fast as features are added, but many operations have gotten faster between 4.0.26 and 5.0.54 and the performance of 5.0.54 is much improved over 5.0.37. I ran a few tests to measure the difference:

• dump and reload a table
• sql-bench

The formatting of the tables below looked great when I previewed them using the blog editor, but not so good when published.

Dump and Reload

I measured the time to dump and reload a table. The table has 10 million rows, 3 int columns and no indexes. MyISAM and InnoDB storage engines were used. The InnoDB tables were on a tmpfs filesystem to avoid disk IO. The test was performed in 4 steps:

• Load the data into a MyISAM table using load data infile. This measures the performance of inserting without the overhead of parsing SQL statements.
  
• Dump the table using mysqldump --extended-insert. This measures the performance of the MySQL client library and the select code path in the storage engine and the server.
  
• Reload the output of mysqldump into a MyISAM table. This measures the performance of the MySQL client library, the mysql command-line tool, the parser and the storage engine.
  
• Reload the output of mysqldump into an InnoDB table.
  

Performance can change significantly between releases, and usually in the right direction:

• mysqldump is much faster in 5.0. The client library was changed to do fewer read() calls when fetching a query result. This is great.
• the parser was very fast in 4.0 and 5.0.54 has returned some of that performance. Inserting a large number of rows is frequently bound by the performance of the parser and this was much slower in early 5.0 releases.
• because of a bug in the 5.0.54 mysql command line client, I used the version from 5.0.51 for the 5.0.54 tests.

This lists the number of seconds to run each test.

Version	load data infile	mysqldump	insert to MyISAM	insert to InnoDB
4.0.26	8.9	19.7	33.7	72.7
4.1.22	8.5	22.7	42.7	79.9
5.0.37	9.3	9.4	69.6	117.7
5.0.54	9.2	9.6	50.8	52.5

sql-bench

This is a simple benchmark distributed with MySQL. I ran the version provided with 4.0.26.

• InnoDB was used for all tables.
  
• Constants that determine the amount of work done for each test were changed.
  
• Tests were run on a server with 4 CPU cores.
• 32-bit binaries were used.

5.0.54 is the fastest. This lists the number of seconds to run each section of the test.

Release	Total Time	Alter	ATIS	big-tables	connect	create	insert	select	transactions	wisconsin
4.0.26	390	92	44	35	41	59	31	39	32	27
4.1.22	412	85	42	50	52	62	33	32	36	31
5.0.37	422	42	45	66	67	61	34	38	48	36
5.0.54	378	40	45	58	54	56	33	36	39	30