Why MariaDB Outperforms MySQL: A Detailed Performance Comparison

MySQL Development History

MySQL was created in the mid‑1990s and released under the GPL in 2000. The InnoDB storage engine was introduced in 2001 and later became the default engine in MySQL 5.5 (2010). After Sun acquired MySQL AB in 2008, Oracle bought Sun in 2009, bringing MySQL under Oracle’s control.

MariaDB – The Fork

Concerned about Oracle’s direction, Michael Widenius forked MySQL before it could become closed‑source and created MariaDB, a community‑maintained drop‑in replacement. MariaDB aims for full compatibility with MySQL’s APIs and command‑line tools and uses XtraDB (a variant of InnoDB) as its default storage engine. Versioning diverged from MySQL, starting at 10.0.

Test Environment

CPU: Intel i7

Memory: 8 GB

OS: Windows 10 64‑bit

Disk: SSD

MySQL version: 8.0.19

MariaDB version: 10.4.12

Both servers used an identical schema:

CREATE TABLE `performance`.`log`(
  `id` INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  `time` DATETIME NOT NULL,
  `level` ENUM('info','debug','error') NOT NULL,
  `message` TEXT NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE=INNODB CHARSET=utf8;

Insert Performance

Single‑Row Inserts

Inserting rows one by one showed that MariaDB is roughly twice as fast as MySQL. Average per‑row time:

MySQL: 0.005185 s

MariaDB: 0.002409 s

For 10 000 rows the total elapsed time was 54.98 s (MySQL) vs 24.45 s (MariaDB).

Batch Inserts

When rows were inserted in batches, MariaDB still outperformed MySQL on average, though the margin was smaller.

MySQL average per‑row time: 0.000035 s

MariaDB average per‑row time: 0.000022 s

For 10 000 rows the total time was 0.328 s (MySQL) vs 0.181 s (MariaDB).

Query Performance

Both databases were populated with 6 785 000 rows before running the queries.

No Index

Count rows: MySQL 6.404 s, MariaDB 3.065 s (MariaDB uses ~474 MB vs MySQL ~66 MB).

MAX/MIN `time`: MySQL 8.159 s, MariaDB 6.333 s.

`time` range + sort: MySQL 10.193 s, MariaDB 6.996 s.

`level` = 'info': MySQL 0.049 s, MariaDB 0.006 s.

`message` = 'debug': MySQL 0.004 s, MariaDB 0.003 s.

With Index

Indexes added:

ALTER TABLE `performance`.`log`
  ADD INDEX `time` (`time`),
  ADD INDEX `level` (`level`),
  ADD FULLTEXT INDEX `message` (`message`);

Index creation time: MySQL 3 min 48 s, MariaDB 2 min 47 s.

MAX/MIN `time`: MySQL 0.006 s, MariaDB 0.001 s.

`time` range + sort: MySQL 0.398 s, MariaDB 0.020 s.

`level` = 'info': MySQL 0.065 s, MariaDB 0.049 s.

`message` full‑text search: MySQL 0.003 s, MariaDB 0.005 s.

Some indexed queries were slower than their non‑indexed counterparts, illustrating that indiscriminate indexing can be counter‑productive.

Conclusion

Across the benchmarks, MariaDB consistently delivered higher performance than MySQL, especially for insert operations and many read queries. The speed advantage comes at the cost of higher memory consumption, and careful index selection remains important for optimal query performance.