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Say I have two servers, both with the same RAID 10 SSD HDD, 128GB Ram, etc.. I'm trying to figure out which server to get. There is a significant price difference between these two following setups, and I dont want to be paying about double the price for resources that may not be used by MySQL or would be technically a downgrade?

Server 1: Single Proc Intel Xeon E3-1270 v3 @ 3.50GHz with a Single Thread PassMark score of 2212

vs.

Server 2: Quad Core Intel Xeon E5-4650 @ 2.70GHz with a Single Thread PassMark score of 1483

Now the 4650 is significantly more expensive CPU because its a Quad Processor Octocore vs the 1270 which is Single Processor Quad Core. My gut tells me Server 2 is way way more powerful, but when looking at the performance of a Single Thread, Server 1 is actually significantly better.

That has me wondering, for MySQL performance should I be looking at only the single threaded performance, ie. chose Server 1 for a win-win? Or am I looking at this the wrong way?

EDIT: Additional info (which would be equal between Server 1 and 2)

1) CentOS 7 64Bit

2) One very large DB

3) Database is almost exclusively MyISAM

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  • The second CPU has way more threads. And I guess that's more important for you. Just looking at the performance of a single thread is IMHO the wrong attempt as Mysql is multithreated. Commented Jul 26, 2016 at 20:08
  • What OS? How many databases will be hosted? SSD is bad choice for write intensive solutions. Commented Jul 26, 2016 at 20:10

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What you are asking is a very loaded question. Why ?

You are not looking at this the wrong way. I wish more people asked this type of question.

Believe it or not, there are rare circumstances where older versions of MySQL can outperform newer versions of MySQL. When ? In a single threaded environment.

I wrote about this years ago where I quote from MySQL Performance Blog

Percona staged a fully comparison the way you phrased, all things being equal. This applied in terms of hardware and my.cnf configuration.

MySQL 4.1 and MySQL 5.1 with InnoDB plugin (MySQL 5.1.38 introduced the InnoDB Plugin (See MySQL 5.1 Documentation entitled The InnoDB Storage Engine under the heading Additional Resources)) seems to be faster than newer MySQL versions "all things being equal".

When it comes to "all things being equal" and looking for the best possible performance, all you are really left with is scaling up hardware (adding more CPUs, add RAM, getting better disk, etc). Using older versions of MySQL would probably help a little, but you are at the mercy of the bugs those older MySQL versions still have.

Without changing anything at this point, just go with Server 1.

Should you decide to go for more CPUs, then upgrade MySQL. You must tune MySQL's use of InnoDB properly.

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