MySQL 5.1 vs. 5.5 vs. 5.6 Performance Comparison

• MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 both performed significantly better than MySQL 5.1.
• Read/Write and Read Only workloads testing requests per second show a marked improvement for both MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 over MySQL 5.1.
• The 95th percentile response times (explained below) for both Read/Write and Read Only workloads on MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 were much lower (thus faster) than MySQL 5.1.

Hardware Used

• Intel E3-1220 v2
• 8 GB of RAM
• 2 x Crucial M500 240 GB Drives
• RAID 1, using an LSI 9260-4I RAID Card

Constants

• Physical Server Hardware
• OS: CentOS 6.5
• Storm Dedicated
• “Warm Up” Test Before Recording Results

Test Descriptions

• All testing was done with Sysbench.
• MySQL and Sysbench were running on the same host, meaning that both were communicating via Localhost.
• “Warm-up” tests were conducted before recording results.
• Requests per Second: The total number of requests the MySQL server was able to respond to per second.
• 95th Percentile: The number, in milliseconds (ms), below which 95% of the response times fell.
• Read/Write Workloads: MySQL performs Selects, Deletes, Updates, and Inserts.
• Read Only Workloads: MySQL performs Selects only.