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Comment by peterbe | Hacker News Reader

> The article is just anecdote, not really good testing.

Mayhaps. Or, just a snapshot from the trenches of real application development.

We all have to make choices. Different pros and cons. Before jumping into, perhaps run some tests with real stuff and change direction based on that.

In application development is usually doesn't matter what the core difference is between two databases because there are drivers and mappers that you more or less have to use. I.e. the Django ORM makes PostgreSQL convenient.

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Normally, I would agree that it's a snapshot or data point. But one of the things that I don't see mentioned anywhere else is that this is running on a macbook. I don't know how it works with his setup, but I get significantly different performance results on my local dev system (windows) than a linux server.

I run everything in hyper-v docker, which should actually get pretty close to bare-metal performance (as hyper-v sort of runs an instance alongside windows, rather than virtualized on top).

However, due to some quirkyness, maybe something with docker networking, I rarely get very good performance and I assume in this case, they are either using ported versions of the software or also running virtualized.

So I'm not sure if these kind of benchmarks add data points to anything but "performance on a dev machine".

I'm glad you wrote this article because I think people should put themselves out there more (myself included). By doing so, you open yourself up to feedback, both positive and negative, that can help you improve. You have a good example of this with your 9/29 update.

In the spirit of constructive criticism, I second the "not really good testing" feedback, mostly due to the lack of tuning effort and omission of performance-affecting details like configuration, the wire protocols used, how data is being serialized/deserializaed, etc. (though I am no expert with these technologies so some of this may have been implied). All of that may have been overkill for what you were trying to do, but it's what people look for in benchmarking / "good testing". I hope this helps.

Then cat your data to /dev/null because it will blow both Redis and PostgreSQL out of the water when it comes to benchmarks.

Point being they serve very different purposes, it's not about benchmarks.

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