NYCPHP Meetup

[Hans Zaunere]

> I'm sure we've all heard one version or another of which was faster.
> Among the people I've spoken to in person the consensus was MyISAM. But

It depends on what "faster" means.  MyISAM has about a third of the
storage/RAM/processing footprint.  And because it doesn't do
multi-versioning and row level locks, a given table operation will always be
faster than InnoDB, except...

> I recently came across a Falcon benchmark online that showed InnoDB
> being the fastest. I'm sure the real answer is "it depends on your

when the read/write ratio approaches 50% due to table locking vs row locking
(and some other stuff, like the types of available buffers).  This is why
MyISAM is typically favored for the average web application (which are
general read-heavy in well designed applications), and InnoDB can be favored
for more volatile data.  Note that for the "enterprise" style transactions
(finance, for example), InnoDB falls short.  Not until recently can it
support more than about 130 concurrent transactions.  And even now, I'd be
gun shy so pick your battle wisely.

> application", but... anyone care to share their thoughts on this?

The real number is exactly that - depends on what you need to do.  If your
site really starts to push modern hardware, then you can consider a hybrid
environment across multiple pieces of metal (and obviously including all the
other black magic bones and feathers of scaling).

H