[elephant-devel] Elephant backend performance characteristics

[Christoph Ludwig]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 12:40:36PM +0100, Leslie P. Polzer wrote:
> 
> > 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.

Thanks. Do these estimates apply both to read and write operations? Our
current grieve is with the bulk import of data; but in a production
environment, queries will be much more common.

Regards

Christoph


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