MariaDB Foundation isolates subsystem costs with targeted TAF profiles

The MariaDB Foundation has published a series of performance profiles designed to isolate the cost of each individual MariaDB server subsystem, to be run on different hardware to understand how much each feature weighs independently of the machine. For those running MariaDB instances in production, this means being able to answer a concrete question: what is the throughput cost of running binlog, doublewrite, or the Serializable isolation level on your specific hardware.

The profiles emerged from a request by Monty, the creator of MySQL and MariaDB, logged in ticket MDEV‑39497 as a way to isolate the performance cost of individual MariaDB subsystems. The Foundation team then expanded on the idea into a complete suite of reproducible profiles applicable across different hardware, to measure binlog overhead, the cost of isolation levels, threadpool behaviour and the impact of Performance Schema.

How the measurement works

The principle is straightforward: before running any profile, you identify the number of warehouses that fit entirely in the buffer pool, to avoid thrashing and I/O-related behaviour, and to lock in a stable TPS baseline against which to compare all other tests. From there, each profile flips just one switch at a time, with no combinations or optimizations.

Profile family	Measures
Binlog	on/off, minimal, no-blob, semi-sync, WAL
InnoDB	doublewrite off, adaptive hash index, flush log at trx commit 0/2, isolation level (RU, RC, Serializable)
Performance Schema	minimal, medium, full, full with SQL initializer
Threadpool	MariaDB scheduler vs operating system scheduling
Charset	latin1 vs utf8mb3
Logging	general log, slow query log at various granularities
SSL	encrypted connection overhead

All materials — profiles, runner scripts and warehouse sizing tools — are documented in the README of the TAF GitHub repository.

Context: TAF is growing

These profiles build on TAF 4.0, the framework version that added PostgreSQL support alongside MariaDB and MySQL, validated on hardware sponsored by Hetzner, including a host with an Intel i5-13500 and one with an AMD EPYC 9454. According to data released by the Foundation, the 4.0 release exceeded 400 downloads in two weeks, a sign of growing adoption among those benchmarking open-source databases.

For those wanting to repeat the tests on their own hardware, the starting point is the commit mentioned in the announcement and the repository README, which lists the scripts and parameters used for each profile family.