I never can get enough stories about Richard Feynman. I thought I'd heard them all, but somehow I missed this one. It's well written and captures many of the things he worked on later in his life; not to mention it's a really cool article about the beginnings of a rather ambitious project to make a parallel computer in the early 1980s.
Honest benchmarks. Open and gracious group of developers behind it.
Disclaimer - I'm married to one of these guys. I'm not a programmer, but I can see how hard this group has worked to provide something useful to the community and I've enjoyed watching it grow.
We have considered alternatives [1] but randomly selecting from 10,000 rows was selected because it's easy to implement in a threadsafe manner without introducing even more complicated requirements such as a concurrent queue or atomic counter.
Note that after the warm-up, MySQL is essentially guaranteed to have the entire table in its own cache, so the exercise is testing the ORM (if applicable), database connection pool, and the database driver.
Honestly, assuming none of the implementations are using an expensive random number generator (e.g., a random number generator intended for cryptographic use), I don't believe there would be different results if it were feasible to sequentially retrieve rows without the need to contend with concurrency.
Pekk, we'd love to address any problems you can point us to. Obviously we have limited time to work on this, so the best way to get a fix in is via a pull request. Are there any issues in particular you think are especially high-priority?
They have been extremely responsive to feedback so far and always carefully explained why they are not incorporating everything the community suggested.
