Aerospike libs vs Riak libs. Very simplified, yet realistic tests for small to medium websites/apps.
Remember: Never trust someone else's tests, do your own.
#Foreword I am not Google. I don't own gazillions of servers in a cloud. Riak and Aerospike are both awesome databases that scale exceptionally well, however this test doesn't include their performance in a cluster. It also doesn't consider their advanced functionalities like Riak's Map/Reduce or Aerospike's UDF.
This test is about as simple as it can be: You have a single server with a single CPU which is accessing a locally hosted database on an SSD. This is not realistic for high-end websites, however many small websites and services do have a similar setup.
#What is important? For the particular use case that I chose, because reading requests represent about 99% of all requests for me, reading performance is what I'm interested in. I do not care about writing performance. If you do please run your own tests (you should do that anyway).
#Why are the tests "unfair"? Aerospike offers mostly compiled client libs while Riak offers source libs in the targeted programming language. Therefore in most cases Aerospike will have a little performance advantage since native modules are faster. If you call that "unfair" or not is up to you, however this is not a raw comparison, this test compares their individual libraries so this aspect needs to be considered when trying to make realistic tests.
#Do it yourself
- Setup a new droplet on DigitalOcean
- Install Riak
- Install Aerospike
- Configure them to use a comparable storage engine
- Install the client libs you're interested in
- Populate server with some data
- Run your tests
#node.js In my case I was very interested to compare the node.js libs of Riak and Aerospike. However it turned out that Aerospike doesn't support node.js 0.12 yet. Since most node.js folks are people who care about the latest technology (myself included) I don't think anyone wants to see tests for 0.10. The projects where I'm using node.js are all using 0.12 so I had to cancel this test.
Results:
Not available.
Psssht, Aerospike! Implement node.js 0.12 support, we desperately need it.
#PHP PHP is frowned upon by many developers (myself included) for obvious reasons that I'm not going to list here. However it was interesting for me to test it because I own a site that utilizes PHP with a database backend.
Results:
Test performed: Get data by key.
Riak storage: Bitcask
Aerospike storage: device
Iterations: 10,000
Aerospike: 0.1184355974197 ms/GET
Riak: 2.0599334955215 ms/GET
#Python TODO
#C/C++ C/C++ is very uncommon for websites. However we could include a test, even if it's just for fun. This would at least eliminate the disadvantage of Riak libs not being native modules.