[elephant-devel] Elephant backend performance characteristics

[Leslie P. Polzer]

> Background: Our application that makes heavy use of elephant/bdb and the
> association feature in the unstable branch is too slow by at least one order
> of magnitude. We obviously need to profile it first before we start any
> refactoring or changing the elephant configuration, and most likely we will
> find that our application code used for the data import uses an inefficient
> algorithm. But it might be helpful for interpreting the profile data when we
> have some background knowledge about the performance characteristics one can
> expect from elephant and its various backends.

BDB is the fastest backend currently available. Postmodern
is about half as fast and CLSQL lags three or four times
behind.

There are several areas here where a slowdown could occur:
your algorithm, the association code (maybe Ian knows more
about this) or maybe it's just the natural slowdown of
Elephant's disk-backed reads and writes.

Maybe using cached slots would help you, but that's
work in progress.

  Leslie