MySQL 5.1 vs. 5.5 vs. 5.6 Performance Comparison

Posted on October 23, 2014 by J. Mays

Reading Time: 2 minutes

General Results

MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 both performed significantly better than MySQL 5.1.
Read/Write and Read Only workloads testing requests per second show a marked improvement for both MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 over MySQL 5.1.
The 95th percentile response times (explained below) for both Read/Write and Read Only workloads on MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 were much lower (thus faster) than MySQL 5.1.

Requests per Second

MySQL 5.1 vs. 5.5 vs. 5.6 Performance Comparison - Requests per Second - Read and Write Operations

MySQL 5.1 vs. 5.5 vs. 5.6 Performance Comparison - Requests per Second - Read Operations

Response in Milliseconds

MySQL 5.1 vs. 5.5 vs. 5.6 Performance Comparison - Response in Milliseconds (ms) - Read/Write Operations

MySQL 5.1 vs. 5.5 vs. 5.6 Performance Comparison - Response in Milliseconds (ms) - Read Operations

Testing Methodologies

Hardware Used

Constants

Test Descriptions

All testing was done with Sysbench.
MySQL and Sysbench were running on the same host, meaning that both were communicating via Localhost.
“Warm-up” tests were conducted before recording results.
Requests per Second: The total number of requests the MySQL server was able to respond to per second.
95th Percentile: The number, in milliseconds (ms), below which 95% of the response times fell.
Read/Write Workloads: MySQL performs Selects, Deletes, Updates, and Inserts.
Read Only Workloads: MySQL performs Selects only.