Where database blog posts get flame-broiled to perfection
Ah, a truly fascinating piece of work. I must applaud your diligence in meticulously measuring the performance of various MySQL versions. Itās a wonderfully academic exercise, a real love letter to the purity of raw throughput. Itās so... focused. So beautifully oblivious.
Itās especially bold to start your baseline with MySQL 5.6.51. A classic! I mean, who needs security patches? They just add CPU overhead, as your data so clearly shows. Using a version that went End-of-Life over three years ago is a brilliant move. Itās like testing the crash safety of modern cars by comparing them to a Ford Pinto. Sure, the new ones are slower, but they have this pesky feature called "not exploding on impact." Youāve essentially benchmarked a ghost, a digital phantom riddled with more known vulnerabilities than a politicianās promises. I can almost hear the CVEs whispering from the great beyond.
And the dedication to compile from source! A true artisan. This isn't some pre-packaged, vendor-vetted binary. Oh no. This is bespoke, hand-crafted software. I'm sure you audited every line of the millions of lines of C++ for potential buffer overflows, and verified the cryptographic signatures of every dependency in the toolchain, right? Right? Or did you just git clone and pray? Because from where I'm sitting, you've just created a beautiful, artisanal supply chain attack vector. Itās a unique little snowflake of a target.
Iām also smitten with your choice of lab equipment. An ASUS ExpertCenter! Itās soā¦ approachable. Iām sure that consumer-grade hardware has all the necessary out-of-band management and physical security controls one would expect. Itās not like an attacker could just walk away with your "server" under their arm. The choice of a fresh-off-the-presses Ubuntu 24.04 is another masterstrokeānothing says "stable and secure" like an OS that's barely old enough to have its first zero-day discovered.
But my favorite part, the real chefās kiss, is your commitment to radical transparency.
The my.cnf files are here. All files I saved from the benchmark are here and the spreadsheet is here.
Why make attackers work for it? This isnāt just open source; itās open infrastructure. You've laid out the complete architectural blueprint for anyone who might want to, say, craft a perfectly tuned denial-of-service attack, or perhaps exploit a specific configuration setting you've enabled. Itās an act of profound generosity. Here are the keys to the kingdom, please don't rifle through the drawers.
The benchmark itself is a masterpiece of sterile-room engineering.
It's like testing a bank vault's integrity by politely asking the door to open. You haven't benchmarked a database; you've benchmarked a best-case scenario that exists only in a PowerPoint presentation. Throw some malformed UTF-8 at it. Try a UNION-based SQL injection. See how fast it is when itās trying to fend off a polymorphic attack string designed to bypass web application firewalls. I have a few I could lend you.
Your grand conclusion that regressions are from "new CPU overheads" is simply breathtaking. You're telling me that adding features, hardening code, implementing mitigations for speculative execution attacks, and generally making the software less of a security dumpster fire... uses more CPU? Groundbreaking. Itās a revelation. Youāve discovered that armor is, in fact, heavier than cloth.
I can just picture the SOC 2 audit for this setup. "So, for your evidence of vulnerability management, you're presenting a benchmark of an EOL, unpatched database, compiled ad-hoc from source, on a desktop computer, with the configuration files published on the internet?" The silence in that room would be deafening.
Honestly, thank you for this. You've perfectly demonstrated how to optimize for a single metric while completely ignoring the landscape of fire and ruin that is modern cybersecurity.
This isn't a benchmark; it's a bug bounty speedrun where you've given everyone a map and a head start.