A Comparative Analysis of Resource Utilization Efficiency and I/O Performance in MySQL and PostgreSQL Running in Docker Containers
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.61805/fahma.v24i2.241Keywords:
Docker Container, Database Benchmarking, MySQL, PostgreSQL, I/O PerformanceAbstract
The exponential growth of data demands highly efficient relational database management systems (RDBMS). This study evaluates resource utilization and input/output (I/O) performance differences between MySQL 8.0 and PostgreSQL 15 within a Docker container. A quantitative experiment was conducted using a constrained environment of 2 CPU cores and 2 GB RAM, utilizing a normalized sales schema with 100,000 records. Three query scenarios—a complex four-table join, an aggregation, and a single-table range filter—were each executed 30 times under cold and warm-start conditions, reporting statistical means, medians, standard deviations, and 95% confidence intervals. Memory was tracked via container-level resident memory (RSS) and engine-specific buffers (InnoDB buffer pool and PostgreSQL's shared_buffers), while I/O utilized precise before-after deltas. Under warm-start complex joins, PostgreSQL 15 averaged 0.0234 seconds compared to MySQL 8.0’s 0.0442 seconds. PostgreSQL maintained a significantly lower container RSS (~54 MiB versus MySQL’s ~533 MiB), though engine-specific buffer utilization remained closer (~27 MiB versus ~41 MiB). This indicates MySQL’s default settings over-allocate container memory. Ultimately, PostgreSQL 15 demonstrates superior execution speed and resource efficiency for complex queries in limited-resource Docker environments under the default configurations tested here.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Indah Dwi Putri, Maria Yuliana Erni Artika, Rosalia Ningsi Feu Uskenat, Edhy Sutanta, Suparyanto (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
