Whoa, it was a long time since I posted here! But I have been very busy with non-MySQL related issues lately, so that is an explanation I guess.

This week I decided to try a few MySQL things anyway, the plan was to compare MongoDB with MySQL Cluster as a key-value store.

We have some data here at Recorded Future that is currently in MongoDB, it will not fit in DynamoDB (it has secondary indexes for example) and I was thinking that maybe MySQL Cluster was an alternative, it was some time ago since I tried Cluster anyway.

At Recorded Future, we run everything on Amazon EC2, but I was thinking that this benchmark should be about another thing than just comparing MySQL Cluster with MongoDB, I wanted to see the difference between EC2 and some hard iron.

So, I started downloading some data to my recently constructed Linux server box. This server is a home brew machine housed in a Chieftech 4U rackmount box. There is Asus M5A88V EVO mobo in it, and on that there is an 8-core AMD CPU and 16 Gb RAM, so for a box at home for experimental purposes, it's quite reasonable.

What is not reasonable is how Linux folks treat hardware and user requirements sometimes. I understand that the developers of Linux to a not small extent does this in free time.

Also, I understand that stuff sometimes go wrong. But hey, Ubuntu 10.10 (which we use, despite that it is old) is a pretty common Linux distro. On my Mobo there is a Gigibit LAN thingy, as on all Mobos these days, more or less. One of the most common LAN chipsets is from Realtek, either the 8111 or 8168. Seems insignificant, right? No big deal?

Just install Linux and it works, Linux may have issues with very unusual hardware, but not with something as common as the Realtek 8111/8168? Beeep! Wrong answer! Sure, it works, but slowly.

If you look carefully, you realize that network performance is dead slow, and further investigation shows that this is due to a lot of dropped packets.