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@ 2018/01/15Vendors like to tell us how the transition to NVMe-based storage will dramatically improve performance. In fact, I’ve talked at length myself about the benefits of NVMe technology. However, it helps to have empirical (and independent) evidence to back up the claims of the industry.
Applying the findings to something more real-world, the researchers moved on to test against both traditional relational and NoSQL databases. MySQL was used for the relational tests and required some additional setup to optimise for NVMe storage. TPC-C testing was then performed against a configuration of a single SSD, four SSDs in a RAID-0 stripe, a single NVMe SSD and a virtual file system in DRAM (tempfs).
The results are displayed in figure 3. Graph (a) shows the results for a single SSD, with the green lines representing a huge amount of CPU wait time. With four drives (b) the I/O load is more distributed so wait time is reduced. With a single NVMe SSD, there is almost no wait time, although the CPU isn’t fully utilised. Similarly in (d), the tempfs control, the user time is higher (representing the improvement in performance/latency from DRAM compared to NVMe), with no discernable wait time at all.
Applying the findings to something more real-world, the researchers moved on to test against both traditional relational and NoSQL databases. MySQL was used for the relational tests and required some additional setup to optimise for NVMe storage. TPC-C testing was then performed against a configuration of a single SSD, four SSDs in a RAID-0 stripe, a single NVMe SSD and a virtual file system in DRAM (tempfs).
The results are displayed in figure 3. Graph (a) shows the results for a single SSD, with the green lines representing a huge amount of CPU wait time. With four drives (b) the I/O load is more distributed so wait time is reduced. With a single NVMe SSD, there is almost no wait time, although the CPU isn’t fully utilised. Similarly in (d), the tempfs control, the user time is higher (representing the improvement in performance/latency from DRAM compared to NVMe), with no discernable wait time at all.
